Twenty years ago, Oakland tried to teach black children in an entirely different way. The failure still haunts us.

Several times a week, a U.S. Air Force pilot takes off from the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, and heads for the northernmost edge of NATO territory to gather intelligence on Russia. One of these pilots is 40-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Webster, a veteran of many such expeditions and a hard guy to rattle. On a typical flight, his four-engine, silver and white RC-135 jet will rise gracefully over the old World War II bomber bases in East Anglia. It then flies over the North Sea and Denmark, taking care to remain within international airspace. When Webster reaches the Baltic Sea, the surveillance operation begins in earnest. Behind the cockpit, the fuselage of his plane is crammed with electronic equipment manned by some two dozen intelligence officers and analysts. They sit in swivel chairs, monitoring emissions, radar data and military communications harvested from below that appear on their computer screens or stream through their headphones. Inside the plane, it is chilly. The air smells faintly of jet fuel, rubber and warm wiring. The soft blue carpet helps absorb the distant thrum of the engines, and so it is also surprisingly quiet—at least until the Russians show up.

As the Polish coast fades into the distance, Webster may swing left to avoid passing directly over the heavily armed Russian base at Kaliningrad. This is where, without warning, a Russian SU-27 fighter may materialize as if out of nowhere, right outside the cockpit window, flying so close that Webster can make out the tail markings. No matter how often this happens—and lately, it has been happening a lot—these encounters always give Webster a jolt. For one thing, he and his crew can’t see the planes coming. Although his jet is carrying millions of dollars worth of the most sophisticated listening devices available to man, it lacks a simple radar to spot an incoming plane. So the only way Webster can find out what the Russian jet is doing—how close it’s flying, whether it’s making any sudden moves—is to dispatch a junior airman to crouch on the floor and peer through one of the 135’s three fuselage windows, each the size of a cereal box and inconveniently placed just below knee level.

In normal times, being intercepted isn’t a cause for concern. Russian jets routinely shadow American jets over the Baltic Sea and elsewhere. Americans routinely intercept Russian aircraft along the Alaskan and California coasts. The idea is to identify the plane and perhaps to signal, “You keep an eye on us, we keep an eye on you.” These, however, are far from normal times. Every few weeks, a Russian pilot will get aggressive. Instead of closing in on the RC-135 at around 30 miles per hour and skulking off its wing for a while, a fighter jet will careen directly toward the American plane at 150 miles per hour or more before abruptly going nose-up to bleed off airspeed and avoid a collision. Or it might perform the dreaded “barrel roll”—a hair-raising maneuver in which the Russian jet makes a 360-degree orbit around the 135’s midsection while the two aircraft hurtle along at 400 miles per hour. When this happens, there is only one thing the U.S. pilot can do: pucker up,^[1] fly straight and hope his Russian counterpart doesn’t smash into him. “One false move and you may have a half second to react,” one RC-135 pilot told me.

By now, it is widely recognized that Russia is waging a campaign of covert political manipulation across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, fueling fears of a second Cold War. But it’s less understood that in international airspace and waters, Russia and the U.S. are brushing up against each other in perilous ways with alarming frequency. This problem, which began not long after Russia’s seizure of the Crimea in 2014, has accelerated rapidly in the past year. In 2015, according to its air command headquarters, NATO scrambled jets more than 400 times to intercept Russian military aircraft that were flying without having broadcast their required identification code or having filed a flight plan. In 2016, that number had leapt to 780—an average of more than two intercepts a day. There has been a similar increase in Russian jets intercepting US or NATO aircraft, as well as a significant uptick in incidents at sea in which Russian jets run mock attacks against American warships.

Russia is hardly the only source of anxiety for the Pentagon. American and Chinese ships and aircraft have clashed in the South China Sea; in early 2016, Iran seized 10 Navy sailors after their boats strayed into its waters. But senior U.S. officials view run-ins with Russia as the most dangerous, because they are part of a deliberate strategy of intimidation and provocation by Russian president Vladimir Putin—and because the stakes are so high. One false move by a hot-dogging Russian pilot could send an American aircraft and its crew spiraling 20,000 feet into the sea. Any nearby U.S. fighter would have to immediately decide whether to shoot down the Russian plane. And if the pilot did retaliate, the U.S. and Russia could quickly find themselves on the brink of open hostility.

“We are now at maximum danger,” said Admiral James Stavridis, a former commander of NATO.

With these issues in mind, I traveled to Germany this winter to talk with U.S. Air Force General Tod D. Wolters, who commands American and NATO air operations. We sat in his headquarters at Ramstein Air Base, a gleaming, modern complex where officers in the uniforms of various NATO nations bustle efficiently through polished corridors. “The degree of hair-triggeredness is a concern,” said Wolters, a former fighter pilot who encountered Soviet bloc pilots during the Cold War. “The possibility of an intercept gone wrong,” he added, is “on my mind 24/7/365.” Admiral James G. Stavridis, the commander of NATO from 2009 to 2013 and now Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, is more blunt. The potential for miscalculation “is probably higher than at any other point since the end of the Cold War,” he told me. “We are now at maximum danger.”

This may sound counter-intuitive, given President Donald Trump’s extravagant professions of admiration for Putin. But the strong consensus inside the U.S. military establishment is that the pattern of Russian provocation will continue—and not just because the various investigations into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia make détente politically unlikely. Antagonizing the West is central to one of Putin’s most cherished ambitions: undermining NATO. By constantly pushing the limits with risky intercepts and other tactics, Putin forces NATO to make difficult choices about when and how to respond that can sow dissension among its members.

In addition, a certain belligerence towards the U.S. is practically a political necessity for Putin. The Russian leader owes his popularity to “the tiger of patriotic mobilization,” said Leon Aron, the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Given the country’s diminished status in the world and its stalled economy, he added, militarized fervor for the motherland “is the only thing going for his regime.” Meanwhile,^[2] since the departure of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, his foreign policy team is now dominated by officials who advocate a hard line on Russia.^[3] For all these reasons, Philip Breedlove, who retired last summer after three years as supreme allied commander of NATO, isn’t optimistic that Russia will back off anytime soon. “We’re in a bad place and it’s getting worse rather than better,” he told me. “The probability of coming up against that unintended but strategic mess-up is, I think, rising rather than becoming less likely.” When Breedlove’s successor, General Curtis Scaparrotti, took command in May 2016, he grimly warned a gathering of diplomats and officers of a “resurgent Russia” and cautioned that NATO must be ready “to fight tonight if deterrence fails.”

All of this is happening at a time when most of the old Cold War safeguards for resolving tensions with Russia—treaties, gentlemen’s understandings, unofficial back channels—have fallen away. When a Russian jet barrel-rolls a U.S. aircraft, a senior U.S. official hops in a car and is driven to the white marble monolith on Wisconsin Avenue that houses the Russian embassy. There, he sits down with Sergey Kislyak, the ambassador who has recently attained minor fame for his surreptitious meetings with various Trump associates. A typical conversation, the U.S. official told me, goes something like this: “I say, ‘Look here, Sergey, we had this incident on April 11, this is getting out of hand, this is dangerous.’” Kislyak, the official said, benignly denies that any misbehavior has occurred. (When I made my own trip to the embassy late last year, a senior official assured me with a polite smile that Russian pilots do nothing dangerous—and certainly not barrel-rolls.)

Among the many senior officers I spoke to in Washington and Europe who are worried about Russia, there was one more factor fueling their anxiety: their new commander-in-chief, and how he might react in a crisis. After a Russian fighter barrel-rolled an RC-135 over the Baltic Sea last April, Trump fumed that the Obama administration had only lodged a diplomatic protest. He considered this to be a weak response. “It just shows how low we’ve gone, where they can toy with us like that,” he complained on a radio talk show. “It shows a lack of respect.” If he were president, Trump went on, he would do things differently. “You wanna at least make a phone call or two,” he conceded. “[But] at a certain point, when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot. You gotta shoot. I mean, you gotta shoot.”

One day in the mid-1980s, I stood with a cluster of American troopers on a hillside observation post near the Fulda Gap, on the border between East and West Germany. If there was going to be a war, it would come here. The Red Army would pour across the border and attempt to bludgeon the smaller U.S. and NATO forces into surrender. Each side had deployed nuclear weapons close at hand.

The soldiers at the border post were tense, serious. A few nights earlier, a man had tried to escape from the East, sprinting jaggedly across a stretch of plowed ground, somehow avoiding snipers, landmines and teams of killer dogs. The East German police shot him as he scaled a chain-link fence mere yards from the safety of West Germany. Impaled on the barbed wire, he bled slowly to death as the Americans watched in horror, his fading cries cutting through the night.

From my vantage point on top of an old concrete bunker, I looked across the misty farmland. A mile or two away were the emplacements of the Soviet Red Army. “See ‘em? Right there!” a sergeant told me. Not sure whether I was looking in the right place, I raised my hand to point. The sergeant swiftly knocked it down. “We don’t point!” he exclaimed, almost panicked. Russian and American commanders had banned such gestures, since they could so easily be mistaken for someone raising a weapon. Among troops on the front line, there was an unmistakable sense that catastrophic war was more likely to be set off by an accident than by an intentional invasion.

Looking back, it seems nothing short of miraculous that the Cold War actually remained cold. On so many occasions, misunderstandings and confusion could have erupted into mutual annihilation. One of the most frightening near-misses came in 1983, when the aging Soviet leadership in the Kremlin was convinced that an attack by the U.S. was imminent. They had been badly rattled by President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the Soviet superpower was an “evil empire” destined for “the ash-heap of history,” and by his talk of developing a so-called Star Wars defense system capable of zapping any target from space. And so when Soviet spies began reporting on a large-scale US-NATO military exercise, code-named Able Archer, the Kremlin concluded that they were witnessing preparations for a massive conventional and nuclear offensive.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on December 8, 1987. It was the first time that the two sides committed to reducing their nuclear arsenals. (Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images)

It did look like the real thing. The Pentagon sent tanks, artillery and 19,000 troops into Germany for weeks of mock combat operations. Bombers were loaded with dummy nuclear warheads in a rehearsal of procedures for transitioning from conventional to nuclear war. In Moscow, the General Staff began calling up military reserves and canceling troop leaves. Factories conducted air raid drills. Fighter and bomber squadrons were put on heightened alert. And inside the Kremlin, senior leaders considered a preemptive nuclear strike to avoid defeat, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence report produced six years later. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency picked up some of this, but officials simply didn’t believe the Soviets thought the U.S. intended to launch a nuclear attack. After all, they reasoned, these rehearsals were an annual event and the U.S. and NATO had even issued press releases describing Able Archer as a training exercise. They didn’t realize that in Moscow, these assurances were waved aside as lies.

The Soviets decided not to act, for reasons that remain unclear—but misunderstandings like these alarmed both sides. The U.S. and Russia together had more than 61,000 nuclear warheads, many mounted on missiles targeted at each other and on hair-trigger alert. And so, beginning in the late 1980s, the United States, Russia and their allies started developing a set of formal mechanisms for preventing accidental war. These treaties and agreements limited the size of deployed forces, required both sides to exchange detailed information about weapon types and locations and allowed for observers to attend field exercises. Regular meetings were held to iron out complaints. Russian and American tank commanders even chatted during military exercises. The aim, ultimately, was to make military activities more transparent and predictable. “They worked—we didn’t go to war!” said Franklin C. Miller, who oversaw crises and nuclear negotiations during a long Pentagon career.

And yet few of these agreements have survived Putin’s regime and the brewing animosity between Moscow and Washington. The problem, a senior U.S. official explained, isn’t that the agreements are faulty or outdated, but rather that the Russians can no longer be trusted to observe them.

The result is that the U.S and Russia are now more outwardly antagonistic than they have been in years. Since the Cold War ended in 1991, NATO has accepted 10 European countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union. In response, Russia has expanded its military; engaged in powerful cyberwar attacks against Estonia, Germany, Finland, Lithuania and other countries; seized parts of Georgia; forcibly annexed Crimea; sent its troops into Ukraine; and staged multiple no-notice exercises with the ground and air power it would use to invade its Baltic neighbors. In one such maneuver last year, Russia mobilized some 12,500 combat troops in territory near Poland and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. According to a technical analysis by the RAND Corp., a lightning Russia strike could carry its troops into NATO capitals in the Baltics in less than 60 hours.

Last year, NATO shifted its official strategy from “assurance”—a passive declaration to stand by its allies—to “deterrence,” which requires sufficient combat power to repel armed aggression. The alliance also approved a new multinational response force, some 40,000 troops in all. In January, under a separate Obama administration initiative, the United States rushed a 4,000-strong armored brigade combat team to Poland and the Baltic states. (Lieutenant General Tim Ray, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe, explained that its objective is to “to deter Russian aggression” by stationing “battle-ready” forces in forward positions.) Army engineers have started strengthening eastern European runways to accept heavier air shipments and are reconfiguring some eastern European railroads to handle rail cars carrying tanks and heavy armor. This March, a U.S. combat aviation brigade arrived in Germany with attack gunships, transport and medevac helicopters and drones, and is deploying its units to Latvia, Romania and Poland.

So far, these efforts to shore up NATO have proceeded despite the Trump administration’s occasional shows of disdain for the military alliance.^[4] In late March, Scaparrotti acknowledged that he had not yet briefed the president about NATO-Russia relations. However, Trump’s secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, recently made a point of affirming that NATO is the “fundamental bedrock” of American security. Any change to that policy would be met with fierce opposition in Congress from defense stalwarts like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is demanding that the United States use “all elements of American power” against Russia.

This February, the two top commanders of the United States and Russia met in Azerbaijan, in a rare effort to bring some stability to U.S.-Russia relations. A month later, they met again in Turkey to review a procedure to prevent accidents involving aircraft operating over Syria. But that’s a narrow issue. A broader restoration of the Cold War-era constraints on military activity seems unlikely. Increasingly, each side sees the other as an adversary. A senior Russian diplomat put the blame squarely on the United States. “We are being seen as an object to deter—as the enemy,” he told me. “In that case, how are we going to talk?”

What this means is that there are few remaining mechanisms to defuse unexpected emergencies. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in late March, Scaparrotti acknowledged that he has virtually no contact with Russian military leaders. (“Don’t you think that would be a good idea?” Independent Senator Angus King of Maine queried. “If you could say, ‘Wait a minute, that missile was launched by accident, don’t get alarmed’?”) In 2014, in response to Russia’s intervention in Crimea, Congress passed a law halting almost all military-to-military communications. Even the spontaneous and informal exchanges that used to occur among Russian and American officers have largely ended.

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who commands U.S. Army forces in Europe, told me last year that he knew his Russian counterpart—at the time, Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov—but had no direct contact with him. If a problem arose—say, a U.S. Special Forces sergeant serving as a trainer in Ukraine suddenly encountered a Russian commando and gunfire broke out—Hodges couldn’t have called Kartapolov to cool things off. There are no other direct lines of communication. Once, Hodges told me, he sat next to the general at a conference. He filled Kartapolov’s water glass and gave him a business card, but the gestures were not reciprocated and they never spoke.

In December 2015, a Turkish F-16 jet shot down a Russian SU-24 fighter on the Turkish-Syrian border. The Russian fighter plummeted in flames and its co-pilot was killed by ground fire. The surviving pilot, Captain Konstantin Murakhtin, said he’d been attacked without warning; Turkey insisted that the Russian plane had violated its airspace. Within days Putin had deftly turned the incident to his advantage. Instead of seeking to punish Turkey, he accused the U.S. of having a hand in the incident, without any evidence. Then he coaxed Turkey, a NATO member, into participating in joint combat operations over Syria. He also engineered Syrian peace talks in which the United States was pointedly not invited to participate. It was a bravura performance. Russia, says Breedlove, the retired NATO commander, “is playing three-dimensional chess while we are playing checkers.”

Putin’s favored tactic, intelligence officials say, is known as “escalation dominance.” The idea is to push the other side until you win, a senior officer based in Europe explained—to “escalate to the point where the adversary stops, won’t go farther. It’s a very destabilizing strategy.” Stavridis cast it in the terms of an old Russian proverb: “Probe with a bayonet; when you hit steel withdraw, when you hit mush, proceed.” Right now, he added, “the Russians keep pushing out and hitting mush.”

This mindset is basically the opposite of how both American and Soviet leaders approached each other during the Cold War, even during periods of exceptional stress such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Having endured the devastation of World War II, they understood the horror that lurked on the far side of a crisis. “When things started to get too close, they would back off,” said Miller, the retired Pentagon official.

The term of art for this constant recalibration of risk is “crisis management”—the “most demanding form of diplomacy,” writes Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. Leaders had to make delicate judgments about when to push their opponent and when to create face-saving off-ramps. Perhaps most critically, they had to possess the confidence to de-escalate when necessary. Skilled crisis management, Freedman writes, requires “an ability to match deeds with words, to convey threats without appearing reckless, and to offer concessions without appearing soft, often while under intense media scrutiny and facing severe time pressures.”

A recent textbook example came in January 2016, when Iran seized those 10 U.S. Navy sailors, claiming that they had been spying in Iranian waters in the eastern Persian Gulf. President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, immediately opened communications with his counterpart in Tehran, using channels established for negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran. By the next morning, the sailors had been released. The U.S. acknowledged the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters but did not apologize, asserting that the transgression had been an innocent error. Iran, meanwhile, acknowledged that the sailors had not been spying. (The peaceful resolution was not applauded by Breitbart News, headed at the time by Stephen Bannon, who is now Trump’s chief White House strategist. Obama, a Breitbart writer sneered, has been “castrated on the world stage by Iran.”)

Today, thanks to real-time video, the men in the Kremlin and White House can know—or think they know—as much as the guy in the cockpit of a plane or on the bridge of a warship.

Neither Putin nor Trump, it’s safe to say, are crisis managers by nature. Both are notoriously thin-skinned, operate on instinct, and have a tendency to shun expert advice. (These days, Putin is said to surround himself not with seasoned diplomats but cronies from his old spy days.) Both are unafraid of brazenly lying, fueling an atmosphere of extreme distrust on both sides. Stavridis, who has studied both Putin and Trump and who met with Trump in December, concluded that the two leaders “are not risk-averse. They are risk-affectionate.” Aron, the Russia expert, said, “I think there is a much more cavalier attitude by Putin toward war in general and the threat of nuclear weapons. He continued, “He is not a madman, but he is much more inclined to use the threat of nuclear weapons in conventional [military] and political confrontation with the West.” Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that Putin is far more calculating than Trump. In direct negotiations, he is said to rely on videotaped analysis of the facial expressions of foreign leaders that signal when the person is bluffing, confused or lying.

At times, Trump has been surprisingly quick to lash out at a perceived slight from Putin, although these moments have been overshadowed by his effusive praise for the Russian leader. On December 22, Putin promised to strengthen Russia’s strategic nuclear forces in his traditional year-end speech to his officer corps. Hours later, Trump vowed, via Twitter, to “greatly strengthen and expand” the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. On Morning Joe the following day, host Mika Brzezinski said that Trump had told her on a phone call, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” And in late March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was becoming increasingly frustrated with Russia, throwing up his hands in exasperation when informed that Russia may have violated an arms treaty.

Some in national security circles see Trump’s impulsiveness as a cause for concern but not for panic. “He can always overreact,” said Anthony Cordesman, senior strategic analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a veteran of many national security posts throughout the U.S. government. “[But] there are a lot of people [around the president] to prevent an overreaction with serious consequences.” Let’s say that Trump acted upon his impulse to tell a fighter pilot to shoot a jet that barrel-rolled an American plane. Such a response would still have to be carried out by the Pentagon, Cordesman said—a process with lots of room for senior officers to say, “Look, boss, this is a great idea but can we talk about the repercussions?”

And yet that process is no longer as robust as it once was. Many senior policymaking positions at the Pentagon and State Department remain unfilled. A small cabal in the White House, including Bannon, Jared Kushner and a few others, has asserted a role in foreign policy decisions outside the normal NSC process. It’s not yet clear how much influence is wielded by Trump’s widely respected national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. When lines of authority and influence are so murky, it increases the risk that a minor incident could boil up into an unintended clash, said retired Marine Corps General John Allen, who has served in senior military and diplomatic posts.

To complicate matters further, the relentless pace of information in the social media age has destroyed the one precious factor that helped former leaders safely navigate perilous situations: time. It’s hard to believe now, but during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, for instance, President Kennedy and his advisers deliberated for a full 10 weeks before announcing a naval quarantine of the island. In 1969, a U.S. spy plane was shot down by North Korean jets over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 Americans on board. It took 26 hours for the Pentagon and State Department to recommend courses of action to President Richard Nixon, according to a declassified secret assessment. (Nixon eventually decided not to respond.) Today, thanks to real-time video and data streaming, the men in the Kremlin and White House can know—or think they know—as much as the guy in the cockpit of a plane or on the bridge of a warship. The president no longer needs to rely on reports from military leaders that have been filtered through their expertise and deeper knowledge of the situation on the ground. Instead, he can watch a crisis unfold on a screen and react in real time. Once news of an incident hits the internet, the pressure to respond becomes even harder to withstand. “The ability to recover from early missteps is greatly reduced,” Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written. “The speed of war has changed, and the nature of these changes makes the global security environment even more unpredictable, dangerous, and unforgiving.”

And so in the end, no matter how cool and unflappable the instincts of military men and women like Kevin Webster, what will smother the inevitable spark is steady, thoughtful leadership from within the White House and the Kremlin. A recognition that first reports may be wrong; a willingness to absorb new and perhaps unwelcome information; a thick skin to ward off insults and accusations; an acknowledgment of the limited value of threats and bluffs; and a willingness to recognize the core interests of the other side and a willingness to accept a face-saving solution. These qualities are not notably on display in either capital.

How an unassuming bureaucrat outsmarted Jamie Oliver and pulled off an honest-to-god miracle in one of America's unhealthiest cities.

Since we chose a retrograde misogynist to be the most powerful person on Earth, now seems like a good time to talk about sexual harassment, political correctness and how things actually get better in this country.

Thirty years ago and for a millennium or two before that, Trumpian sexual harassment was closer to the norm. Nearly everything our new president has been accused of—cornering random women and kissing them, groping employees, firing his staff for reporting their managers—was an accepted occupational hazard for women regardless of what occupation they held.

When we look back at the bad old days of sexism, we usually focus on the way attitudes have changed. And indeed they have. Most Americans, if poll numbers are any indication, find Trump’s alleged behavior repellant. The blatant, sneering “C’mere toots” sleaziness he represents hasn't disappeared, of course, but it's become less palatable, the kind of thing men have to dig up phrases like “locker room talk” to defend.

But when we tell the story of this huge (and incomplete) shift in attitudes, we tend to overlook the quieter shifts in the legal system that were just as consequential. In a 1979 case in which a woman sued three of her supervisors for harassing her, a District Court judge found that “the making of improper sexual advances to female employees [was] standard operating procedure, a fact of life, a normal condition of employment”—but still refused to award her any damages. Until 1986, the only form of sexual harassment that was illegal was quid pro quo harassment, where your boss explicitly said something like, “Sleep with me or lose your job.”

The fact that employers these days are responsible for preventing harassment, and are on the hook for millions of dollars in punitive damages if they don’t, is not a coincidence. It's the result of decades of work by women’s groups, and dozens of victims risking their livelihoods to come forward and call bullshit on the Trumpian impunity that used to be the norm.

Which brings us to a new Highline video series called “I Misremember the 90s.” Over the next few months, the series will re-examine some of the decade’s seminal events in an effort to pluck out the big ideas we missed, the figures we misunderstood and the half-truths that hardened into conventional wisdom. We hope that, by trying to understand the ’90s, we can live and think better now.

And the first episode is about the Anita Hill hearings. It’s true that they woke America up to the sleeping giant of sexual harassment. Just two years after Hill came forward to accuse Clarence Thomas of telling her about his porn habits at work, harassment cases had nearly doubled. Less than a year after the hearing, 19 women were elected to the House of Representatives and four to the Senate. The press called 1992 “The Year of the Woman.”

But that’s not the whole story. You’ve got to watch the video for that.

When politicians take money from megadonors, there are strings attached. But with the reclusive duo who propelled Trump into the White House, there’s a fuse.

Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.

That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table. Unlike the other offices, it also had a curtain so no one could see what was happening inside. Before this point, Rebekah’s resume had consisted of a brief run trading stocks and bonds (including at her father’s hedge fund), a longer stint running her family’s foundation and, along with her two sisters, the management of an online gourmet cookie shop called Ruby et Violette. Now, she was compiling lists of potential candidates for a host of official positions, the foot soldiers who would remake (or unmake) the United States government in Trump’s image.

Rebekah wasn’t a regular presence at Trump Tower. She preferred working from her apartment in Trump Place, which was in fact six separate apartments that she and her husband had combined into an opulent property more than twice the size of Gracie Mansion. Still, it quickly became clear to her new colleagues that she wasn’t content just to chip in with ideas. She wanted decision-making power. To her peers on the executive committee, she supported Alabama senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and General Michael Flynn for national security adviser, but argued against naming Mitt Romney secretary of state. Her views on these matters were heard, according to several people on and close to the transition leadership. Rebekah was less successful when she lobbied hard for John Bolton, the famously hawkish former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to be deputy secretary of state. And when Bolton was not named to any position, she made her displeasure known. “I know it sounds sexist, but she was whiny as hell,” says one person who watched her operate. Almost everyone interviewed for this article, supporters and detractors alike, described her style as far more forceful than that of other powerful donors.

Rebekah Mercer is rarely photographed. However, occasionally she can be found in the background of news photos, uncredited in the captions. Here she is arriving at Trump Tower on December 8, with Nick Ayers and Kellyanne Conway. DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

But then the Mercers aren’t typical donors in most senses beyond their extreme wealth. (The exact number of their billions is unknown.) Robert Mercer is a youthful-looking 70. As a boy growing up in New Mexico, he carried around a notebook filled with computer programs he had written. “It’s very unlikely that any of them actually worked,” he has said. “I didn’t get to use a real computer until after high school.” Robert went on to work for decades at IBM, where he had a reputation as a brilliant computer scientist. He made his vast fortune in his 50s, after his work on predicting financial markets led to his becoming co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful quantitative hedge funds. A longtime colleague, David Magerman, recalls that when Robert began working at Renaissance in 1993, he and his wife, Diana, were “grounded, sweet people.” (Magerman was suspended from Renaissance in February after making critical comments about Robert in The Wall Street Journal.) But “money changed all that,” he says. “Diana started jetting off to Europe and flying to their yacht on weekends. The girls were used to getting what they wanted.”

At Renaissance, Robert was an eccentric among eccentrics. The firm is legendary for shunning people with Wall Street or even conventional finance backgrounds, instead favoring scientists and original thinkers. Robert himself, by all accounts, is extremely introverted. Rarely seen in public, he likes to spend his free time with his wife and three daughters. When, in 2014, Robert accepted an award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, he recalled, in a soft voice and with quiet humor, his consternation at being informed that he was expected to give “an oration on some topic or another for an hour, which, by the way, is more than I typically talk in a month.” Sebastian Mallaby’s account of the hedge-fund elite, More Money Than God, describes him as an “icy cold” poker player who doesn’t remember having a nightmare. He likes model trains, having once purchased a set for $2.7 million, and has acquired one of the country’s largest collections of machine guns.

For years, Robert has embraced a supercharged libertarianism with idiosyncratic variations. He is reportedly pro-death penalty, pro-life and pro-gold standard. He has contributed to an ad campaign opposing the construction of the ground zero mosque; Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, a group that is associated with fringe scientific claims; and Black Americans for a Better Future—a vehicle, the Intercept discovered, for an African-American political consultant who has accused Barack Obama of “relentless pandering to homosexuals.” Magerman, Robert’s former colleague at Renaissance, recalls him saying, in front of coworkers, words to the effect that “your value as a human being is equivalent to what you are paid. ... He said that, by definition, teachers are not worth much because they aren't paid much.” His beliefs were well-known at the firm, according to Magerman. But since Robert was so averse to publicity, his ideology wasn’t seen as a cause for concern. “None of us ever thought he would get his views out, because he only talked to his cats,” Magerman told me.

Robert’s middle daughter Rebekah shares similar political beliefs, but she is also very articulate and, therefore, able to act as her father’s mouthpiece. (Neither Rebekah nor Robert responded to detailed lists of questions for this article.) Under Rebekah’s leadership, the family foundation poured some $70 million into conservative causes between 2009 and 2014.^[1] The first candidate they threw their financial weight behind was Arthur Robinson, a chemist from Oregon who was running for Congress. He was best known in his district for co-founding an organization that is collecting thousands of vials of urine as part of an effort it says will “revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry.” Robinson didn’t win, but he got closer than expected, and the Mercers got a taste of what their money could do. In 2011, they made one of their most consequential investments: a reported $10 million in a new right-wing media operation called Breitbart.

“I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” Robert Mercer told Sheldon Adelson, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

That the family gravitated toward Andrew Breitbart’s upstart website was no accident. The Mercers are “purists,” says Pat Caddell, a former aide to Jimmy Carter who has shifted to the right over the years. They believe Republican elites are too cozy with Wall Street and too soft on immigration, and that American free enterprise and competition are in mortal danger. “Bekah Mercer might be prepared to put a Democrat in Susan Collins’ seat simply to rid the party of Susan Collins,” a family friend joked by way of illustrating her thinking. So intensely do the Mercers want to unseat Republican senator John McCain^[2] that they gave $200,000 to support an opposing candidate who once held a town hall meeting to discuss chemtrails—chemicals, according to a long-standing conspiracy theory, that the federal government is spraying on the public without its knowledge. In short, unlike other donors, the Mercers are not merely angling to influence the Republican establishment—they want to obliterate it. One source told me that, in a meeting with Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer a few years ago, the casino mogul asked Robert if he was familiar with certain big Republican players. According to the source, Robert shut him down. “I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” he replied, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

And so it seemed almost inevitable that their paths converged with Bannon’s when he took over Breitbart in 2012. The Mercers recognized Bannon as an ideological ally. They also appreciated how quickly he improved the website’s finances. Unlike many people in their orbit, Bannon wasn't obsequious: According to one person who often spends time with them, he made zero effort to dress up around his benefactors, often appearing in sweatpants and “looking almost like a homeless person.” Bannon was respectful around Robert, says this person, but with Rebekah he was more apt to say precisely what he thought: “He worked for Bob; he worked with Rebekah.”

Although the Mercers had initially been persuaded to back Texas senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, Bannon preferred Trump, and by the time of the Republican National Convention the Mercers were with him. Rebekah made her move last August, at a fundraiser at the East Hampton estate of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. According to two sources, one who strategized with the Mercers and another who worked closely with Trump, Rebekah insisted on a 30-minute face-to-face meeting with Trump, in which she informed him that his campaign was a disaster. (Her family had pledged $2 million to the effort about a month earlier, so she felt comfortable being frank.) Trump, who knew her slightly, was willing to listen. He had been disturbed by recent stories detailing disorganization in his campaign and alleging ties between Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and pro-Russia officials in Ukraine. Rebekah knew of this and arrived at her meeting with “props,” says the source who strategized with the Mercers: printouts of news articles about Manafort and Russia that she brandished as evidence that he had to go. And she also had a solution in mind: Trump should put Bannon in charge of the campaign and hire the pollster Kellyanne Conway.^[3]

By the following morning, Rebekah was breakfasting at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the two people he trusts most, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to talk through the proposal in more detail. Within four days, Trump did exactly as Rebekah had advised. Manafort was out. Bannon was in charge. Trump also brought on David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, with whom the Mercers and Bannon had been close for years. Less than four months later, Mercer's handpicked team had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in American politics. Through a bizarre combination of daring and luck, the insurgents had won. Now, they were Trump’s version of the establishment—which is to say, a very volatile one.

On July Fourth weekend in 2014, members of the Mercer clan (Robert, Rebekah and her husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff) went to visit some new friends. They traveled on Robert’s 203-foot luxury superyacht, the Sea Owl, and anchored just off the WASP enclave of Fishers Island in New York’s Long Island Sound. Their destination, a medieval-style granite castle called White Caps, towered over the shoreline. This was the summer home of Lee and Alice Hanley, Reagan conservatives who’d made their fortune in Texas oil and gas but lived mostly between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. Like the Mercers, the Hanleys were convinced that the American political establishment was rotten to its foundations. Unlike the Mercers, though, they were popular and vigorous socialites. They loved to entertain and to act as connectors between politicians and donors in their assorted properties, even on their private jet.

That holiday weekend, Lee Hanley revisited the subject of a poll he’d commissioned in 2013 from Pat Caddell, a longtime friend. Hanley had wanted to truly understand the mood of the country and Caddell had returned with something called the “Smith Project.” The nickname alluded to the Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” because its results were so clear: Americans were hungry for an outsider. It didn’t matter whether the candidate came from the left or the right; voters just wanted somebody different. They had lost all faith in the ruling class—the government, the media, Wall Street. “It showed the entire blow-up of the country coming,” Caddell told me. “A whole new paradigm developing.”

No Republican had yet emerged as a front-runner in the 2016 primary, but the Hanleys believed Ted Cruz could take Caddell’s insights and ride them all the way to the White House. They saw Cruz as a unicorn: a dedicated fiscal and social conservative who had broken with his party repeatedly. They were dismissive of Trump. “He doesn't understand politics or geopolitics or anything about the running of the government,” Alice Hanley told me recently.

Rebekah Mercer saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a way to promote her own more hard-line ideology.

Robert Mercer and Cruz had met before during a conference in February 2014, when Lee Hanley had invited them to the five-diamond Breakers resort in Palm Beach for a grilling session. Robert was impressed by Cruz’s intellect, according to a person at the meeting, but worried that the 43-year-old senator was too young and might struggle to capture voters’ imaginations. Still, Robert warmed to him over the course of many weekends at various Hanley homes. Apparently, Cruz can hold his alcohol (his preference is cabernet), which is a prized attribute in the Hanleys’ circle.

As the Mercers weighed whether to get involved in a presidential race, their calculus was quite different from that of other megadonors, most of whom run massive corporate empires. Various people who have worked with the Mercers on campaigns told me they didn’t pressure their candidates to adopt policies that would benefit the family’s financial interests, such as favorable regulations for hedge funds. Instead, their mission was a systemic one. Steve Hantler, a friend of Rebekah’s, says she was determined to “disrupt the consultant class,” which she saw as wasteful and self-serving. She wanted to disrupt the conservative movement, too. Rebekah saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a mechanism to promote a more hard-line ideology. According to Politico and other sources, she was frustrated at the time that no one was taking her seriously. As it happened, however, the family owned what seemed to be an ideal vehicle for achieving her goals.

Around 2012, Robert Mercer reportedly invested $5 million in a British data science company named SCL Group. Most political campaigns run highly sophisticated micro-targeting efforts to locate voters. SCL promised much more, claiming to be able to manipulate voter behavior through something called psychographic modeling. This was precisely the kind of work Robert valued. “There’s no data like more data,” he likes to say. Robert had made his money by accumulating piles of data on human behavior (markets might move in a certain direction when it rains in Paris, for instance), in order to make extremely precise and lucrative financial bets. Similarly, SCL claimed to be able to formulate complex psychological profiles of voters. These, it said, would be used to tailor the most persuasive possible message, acting on that voter’s personality traits, hopes or fears. The firm has worked on campaigns in Argentina, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and Thailand; the Pentagon has used it to conduct surveys in Iran and Afghanistan. Best of all, from the Mercers’ perspective, SCL operated entirely outside the GOP apparatus. (A source close to Rebekah said she wanted a “results-oriented” consultant.) As Rebekah saw it, SCL would allow the Mercers to control the data operation of any campaign they supported, giving the family enormous influence over messaging and strategy.

And it would be Rebekah who would actually carry out this plan. Robert preferred to focus on his work at Renaissance, often operating from his Long Island mansion, Owl’s Nest. “He wouldn’t look under the hood, because that’s not what he does,” says Bob Perkins, one of Caddell’s associates who worked on the Smith Project. Besides, Rebekah was the political animal in the family. (Her older sister Jenji has practiced law; her younger sister Heather Sue is, like Robert, a competitive poker player).

This was a relatively new phenomenon. Rebekah isn't known to have been particularly political earlier in adulthood, while gaining a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford, or in early motherhood. (She has four children with her French-born husband, who became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.) But, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which significantly loosened restrictions on political spending, Rebekah decided it was time to “save America from becoming like socialist Europe,” as she has put it to several people. She started attending Koch events and donating to the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Arizona. The family’s political advocacy accelerated rapidly. It was in 2012 that she really attracted attention in GOP circles when, not long after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race, she stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing but detailed diatribe about his inadequate data and canvassing operation. “Who is that woman?” people in attendance asked.

With SCL, Rebekah finally had the chance to prove she could do better. The company’s American branch was renamed Cambridge Analytica, to emphasize the pedigree of its behavioral scientists. And Rebekah started flying Alexander Nix, the firm’s Old Etonian CEO, around the country to introduce him to her contacts. Nix, 41, is not a data scientist (his background is in financial services), but he is a showy salesman. Dressed in impeccably tailored suits, he is in his element on stage making presentations at large conferences. He can, however, come across as arrogant. (“I love the fact that you're telling your story, but I'm the one giving the interview,” he told me in a conversation.)

Alexander Nix at Cambridge Analytica's New York office. Rebekah Mercer was impressed by Nix's command of data and artistry on the polo field. JOSHUA BRIGHT/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

According to Perkins and Caddell, Rebekah and Nix met with them a few times to discuss how CA could use the Smith Project. Rebekah was clearly impressed by Nix. In one meeting, according to Perkins, she gushed about his polo prowess and asked him to show off cellphone photos of himself on horseback. (Nix says he doesn’t recall this meeting or others with the three. He also doesn’t remember displaying such a picture and can “think of no good reason why Bob or Pat would be interested in horses.") The political veterans were skeptical. “I didn’t understand what Nix was talking about,” Perkins told me bluntly. Caddell says he was perplexed when Nix wouldn’t show him the instruments CA used to predict voter behavior. He also thought the firm didn’t grasp the seismic shift underway in American politics. And yet to his great surprise, Bannon vouched for CA, telling Caddell its scientists were “geniuses.” Caddell knew that Bannon was beholden to the Mercers—they were, after all, Breitbart’s part-owners. According to The New York Times, however, Bannon was also vice president of CA’s board. “Even if he did not have a financial investment, he intellectually owned it, which was invaluable,” says a fellow political strategist. After he learned of Bannon’s involvement, Caddell stopped asking Bannon questions about CA.

In the end, Bannon helped seal the deal between the Mercers and Cruz, with CA as the glue. In the fall of 2014, Toby Neugebauer, a garrulous oil-and-gas billionaire from Texas, took Cruz and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, to the “Breitbart Embassy,” the website’s Washington headquarters near the Capitol. Bannon flitted in and out. Nix, as usual, did most of the talking. After Neugebauer and Roe visited SCL’s London headquarters, the Cruz team agreed that CA could play a key role in their operation, running models and helping with research. However, it was made clear to Rebekah and Nix that the entire data analytics operation would be supervised by Chris Wilson, CEO of the research firm WPA. A source close to Cruz told me that Wilson’s operation had played a crucial role when Cruz ran for the Senate with only 2 percent name recognition in Texas and defeated a far better-known opponent. Why, then, was CA necessary at all? “No one ever said directly that the quid pro quo for hiring CA was that the Mercers would support Cruz,” says someone close to Roe. Nevertheless, after CA was engaged, Neugebauer took a private jet to the Bahamas to meet Robert Mercer on the Sea Owl. When Neugebauer asked him to donate to Cruz’s bid, Robert was matter-of-fact. The family would start with $11 million.

All modern political campaigns have to balance their need for exorbitant sums of money with the obsessions of the people who want to give them that money. Roe, the straight-talking manager of the Cruz operation, has observed that running a campaign is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of complicated personalities and uncomfortable dependencies. He has also told people that he is careful not to get too close to the donors who make his campaigns possible, because they can be so easily annoyed by the most trivial of things—his laugh, for instance, or the way he eats a bread roll.

In the case of the Cruz campaign, the donor obsession in question was Cambridge Analytica. And it wasn’t long before Roe and his team suspected that Nix had promised them a more impressive product than he could deliver. On March 4, 2015, Cruz, Roe, Wilson and others gathered in the Hyatt in Washington D.C. for an all-day meeting with Nix and a group of CA senior executives. Wilson took notes on his computer. According to multiple members of the Cruz team, Wilson was dismayed to learn that CA’s models weren’t fully ready for his focus groups the following week. As far as the team could tell, the only data CA possessed that the campaign didn’t already have appeared to be culled from Facebook. In addition, they recalled, CA hadn’t set itself up with Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s repository of voter information. At one point, they recall, Nix explained that the National Rifle Association’s database of members would be a valuable way to target donors. Wilson typed an emoji with rolling eyes next to the statement because it was so obvious. He told people that he came away thinking, “Red flag, red flag, red flag.”

In response to an extensive set of questions, Nix disputed this account of the meeting. He denied that Cambridge Analytica had obtained any data via Facebook—a source of controversy for the firm ever since The Guardian reported in 2015 that CA based its data on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Nix also claimed that it was the Cruz team that didn’t have access to the RNC’s Data Trust for much of the cycle and that “all data used for the majority of the campaign was provided by Cambridge Analytica.” However, Mike Shields, then the RNC’s chief of staff and Data Trust’s senior adviser, told me the Cruz campaign was in fact the second to sign an agreement with Data Trust, in 2014.

Meanwhile, the red flags kept coming. Wilson found the data scientists that CA sent to Houston to be highly efficient at the day-to-day work of his research operation. But according to Cruz staffers, when he began to test CA’s specialized models, he found that they were notably off, with, for example, some male voters miscategorized as women. In phone surveys, staffers said, CA’s predictions fell short of the 85 percent accuracy the campaign expected. (“Different models have differing levels of accuracy,” Nix said in his response. “I suspect these numbers have been taken out of context to make us look bad. In many previous articles the Cruz campaign have highly rated the quality of our data scientists.”) By September, CA’s first six-month contract was up. A CA employee in the campaign’s Houston office accidentally left the invoice in the photocopier, and Wilson happened to fish it out. The invoice totaled an eye-popping $3,119,052 for work that Wilson estimated to be worth $600,000 at most. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Wilson told Roe, who concurred.

Jeff Roe (left) with Ted Cruz (right), who ultimately fell out of Rebekah Mercer's favor. “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon," a Cruz adviser said. ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

Nix disputed this account too, noting that the firm’s fee was “clearly stated in our statement of work and contract.” However, a former consultant for the campaign, Tommy Sears, attended budget meetings “for two if not three days” over the matter. “There was an understanding between both parties that the totality of the contract through March 2016 would be $5.5 million,” he says. “The heartburn felt by the Cruz team was that over $3 million had already been spent by September 1, 2015.”

When the Cruz team decided not to pay the full $3 million, bedlam ensued. A phone call was scheduled with Rebekah, Bannon and CA’s attorney. “I understand she’s a nice lady,” Wilson says politely of Rebekah. According to multiple people on the call, she accused Wilson of undermining CA. Bannon, meanwhile, unleashed a torrent of profanities at the Cruz team. Someone on the call gave me a censored version of his outburst: “The only reason this campaign is where it is right now is because of our people and I. My recommendation to the Mercers is just to pull them out of there and we’ll have them on another campaign by Monday.” Bannon’s language was so foul it was difficult to listen to, says one person on the call who had never met him before. Another of the political pros, who knew Bannon well, wasn’t shocked. “That’s Steve doing business,” he says.

The Cruz team was taken aback by Rebekah’s reaction. Some even wondered if she’d been given all the facts. One person who was close to the campaign says, “She is somewhere between the daughter of a brilliant hedge fund manager and mathematician and somebody who runs a bakery in New York. She clearly has a skill set, but the skill set we’re discussing here regarding the understanding of the value of data and analytics doesn’t fall into that area. She is operating under the information she’s been given.”

“If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican party,” says a Cruz adviser, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her… She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

The two sides were also diverging ideologically. In the summer of 2015, according to two sources, Rebekah reprimanded Cruz for an April article he’d co-authored with House Speaker Paul Ryan in The Wall Street Journal in support of free trade. She and Bannon told Cruz that he should adopt the positions of Jeff Sessions, whose views on trade and immigration were more in line with the conservative base. By this time, Cruz and his team were becoming increasingly concerned about Bannon’s relationship with Rebekah. Bannon (who declined to comment for this article) was now blatantly pro-Trump. Over the course of the primary, Breitbart would publish around 60 pieces disputing that Cruz was eligible to be president because he had been born in Canada. Cruz repeatedly called Rebekah to complain, but she insisted that she had to be “fair and impartial.” One of his advisers says, “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon.” A person close to Bannon counters: “There's absolutely no way anyone could manipulate Rebekah Mercer." 

After the first debate in South Carolina, Rebekah gave Cruz a “dressing down” on his performance, according to three sources. “Given what was going on around him—and what he must have truly felt—he behaved like an absolute gentleman,” says a person close to Cruz. Rebekah was incensed that Trump had a tougher immigration policy than Cruz did—she particularly liked Trump’s idea for a total ban on Muslims. Subsequently, Cruz proposed a 180-day suspension on all H1-B visas.

Meanwhile, even though the Cruz staffers generally got along well with their CA counterparts—they sometimes took the visitors country-western dancing —the firm remained a source of friction. In retrospect, Wilson told people, he believed that Nix resented the campaign for allocating work through a competitive bidding process, rather than favoring CA. Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Wilson assigned a contract to a firm called Targeted Victory. CA then locked its data in the cloud so it couldn’t be accessed by Roe’s team. The data remained unavailable until, a Cruz campaign source said, it was pretty much too late to be useful. Cruz won the Iowa caucuses anyway.

The Cruz operation became so fed up with Nix that they pushed back, hard, on CA’s bill for its second six-month contract. Wilson was able to negotiate the fees down after, as Cruz staffers recalled, a CA representative accidentally emailed him a spreadsheet documenting the Houston team’s salaries. (Nix said CA had intended to send the spreadsheet.) Still, the campaign wound up paying nearly $6 million to CA—which represented almost half of the money the Mercers had pledged to spend on Cruz’s behalf.

The acrimony lingered long after Cruz exited the race in May. When he decided not to endorse Trump at the GOP convention, the Mercers publicly rebuked him. In a statement, Cruz was diplomatic: “We were delighted to work with Cambridge Analytica, they were a valuable asset to my campaign, and any rumors to the contrary are completely unfounded.” (The source close to Rebekah added, “I was with Rebekah the other day and Ted Cruz was falling all over her. It’s not fair to blame CA's methodology for Cruz's loss.”) Others from Cruz’s team, however, remain bitter about the whole experience. “If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican Party,” says one, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her. … She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

One of the great challenges in reporting this story was that almost every single person in Trump’s orbit claims sole credit for his extraordinary victory on November 8. The multiplying narratives of his win can be difficult to untangle, but it is true that his operation ran somewhat more smoothly after Rebekah Mercer helped to replace Manafort with Bannon. This wasn’t necessarily because Bannon himself was a particularly deft manager—he much preferred to focus on big-picture strategy, especially Trump’s messaging in rallies. Most of the details were left to his deputy, David Bossie—at least until October, when Bossie and Trump got into an argument over Trump’s impetuousness on Twitter and Bossie was kicked off the campaign plane, according to multiple sources. But one undeniable benefit of having Bannon in charge was that Rebekah trusted him.

Bannon, several sources said, can be charming when he chooses to be. And he has a record of successfully cultivating wealthy patrons for his various endeavors over the years. At the same time, certain of his ventures have involved high drama. The most spectacular example is the Biosphere 2, a self-contained ecological experiment under a giant dome in the Arizona desert that was funded by the billionaire Texan Ed Bass. Hired as a financial adviser in the early 1990s, Bannon returned in 1994 and used a court order to take over the project, following allegations that it was being mismanaged. He showed up one weekend along with “a small army of U.S. marshals holding guns, followed by a posse of businessmen in suits, a corporate battalion of investment bankers, accountants, PR people, and secretaries,” according to a history of the project called Dreaming the Biosphere. In an effort to thwart Bannon’s takeover, some of the scientists broke the seal of the dome, endangering the experiment.

Because of his relationship with the Mercers, Bannon was able to avoid some of the tensions over Cambridge Analytica that had plagued the Cruz campaign. Before taking the job, he phoned Brad Parscale, a 41-year-old San Antonio web designer who had made websites for the Trump family for years. Although Parscale had never worked in politics before, he now found himself in charge of Trump’s entire data operation. According to multiple sources, Parscale told Bannon that he had been hauled into an unexpected meeting with Alexander Nix earlier that summer. Parscale, who is fiercely proud of his rural Kansas roots, immediately disliked the polished Briton. He informed Nix he wasn’t interested in CA’s psychographic modeling. Parscale and Bannon quickly bonded, seeing each other as fellow outsiders and true Trump loyalists. Bannon told Parscale: “I don't care how you get it done—get it done. Use CA as much or as little as you want.” Parscale did ultimately bring on six CA staffers for additional support within his data operation. But he had his own theory^[4] of how Trump could secure victory—in the final weeks, he advised Trump to visit Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states no one thought Trump could take. The campaign never used CA’s psychographic methodology, as a CA staffer who worked on the campaign later publicly acknowledged at a Google panel.

For the most part, Rebekah kept a low profile during the last phase of the election. On the few occasions that she appeared at Trump Tower, she sat in Bannon’s 14th-floor office. “Most people had no idea who she even was,” says one person who was there regularly. “The idea that she was on the phone to Trump or anyone all the time, that’s nonsense,” says a different source from the transition. The Mercers did intervene when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging to NBC’s Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women—by making a rare statement in Trump’s defense. In a statement to The Washington Post, they said: “If Mr. Trump had told Billy Bush, whoever that is, earlier this year that he was for open borders, open trade and executive actions in pursuit of gun control, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. …. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio.”

Bannon in the East Wing of the White House on January 22, with Mercer (uncredited) in the background. ANDREW HARRER-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

On election night at Trump Tower, Robert Mercer was nowhere to be seen. Rebekah was in Bannon’s office. Staffers and Trump children wandered in and out of Parscale’s office, because he was usually the first person to have any actual information. Parscale, unlike almost everyone else, including Trump’s children, was convinced his boss was going to win. Trump himself remained glued to the television, refusing to believe anything until victory was officially declared. No one I talked to recalls where Rebekah was in the blur of the celebration.

But people certainly remember her presence during the transition. One night, Rebekah called Trump and told him he absolutely had to make Bannon his White House chief of staff. Trump himself later described the phone call—in a manner an observer characterized as affectionately humorous—to a crowd of about 400 people at the Mercers’ annual costume party at Robert’s mansion on December 3. This year’s theme: “Heroes and Villains.” A guest recalls that Rebekah was dressed in something “that fitted her very well, with holsters.” To the gathering, Trump recounted being woken up at around midnight— Rebekah told friends it was around 10 p.m.—and being bewildered by the late-night tirade. “Rebekah who?” he eventually asked. Everyone laughed,” says the observer. As it happened, Bannon didn’t actually want to be chief of staff, believing himself to be ill-suited to the role. He was named chief strategist instead.

Rebekah had more than personnel decisions on her mind, however. She was particularly focused on what was referred to on the transition as the “outside group.” After the election, it was widely agreed that the GOP needed a nonprofit arm, supported by major donors, to push the president’s agenda across the country, much as the Obama team had set up Organizing for America in 2009. The most important component of any organization like this is its voter database, since it can be used to seek donations and mobilize supporters behind the president’s initiatives. Rebekah wanted CA to be the data engine, which would essentially give her control of the group. And if the venture were successful, she would have an influence over the GOP that no donor had ever pulled off. Theoretically, if the president did something she didn’t like, she could marshal his own supporters against him, since it would be her database and her money. A friend of Rebekah explains: “She felt it was her job to hold the people she’d got elected, accountable to keep their promises.”

“I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” Bannon has told friends.

On December 14, there was a meeting to discuss the outside group in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Brad Parscale sat at the head of the table. Around him were roughly 12 people, including Rebekah; Kellyanne Conway; David Bossie; Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer; Jason Miller, then Trump’s senior communications adviser; and Marc Short, Mike Pence’s senior adviser. Parscale was known to be livid that Alexander Nix had gone on a PR blitz after the election, exaggerating CA’s role. Even worse, Parscale had heard that Nix had been telling people, “Brad screwed up. We had to rescue Brad.” (Nix denied this, saying, “Brad did a brilliant job.”)

And so when Rebekah pushed for CA to run the new group’s data operation, Parscale pushed back. “No offense to the Mercers,” he said, according to multiple attendees. “First, this group is about Trump, not about the Mercers. Second, I don’t have a problem with hiring Cambridge, but Cambridge can’t be the center of everything, because that’s not how the campaign ran.” (He did, however, suggest that Rebekah be on the board.) “No offense taken,” Rebekah replied.

But she would subsequently complain about the exchange to Bannon and others, and continued to lobby for CA to be at the center of the new organization. The situation became so testy that before the inauguration, Jared Kushner brought in Steve Hantler, Rebekah’s friend, to referee. Hantler, a quiet, gentlemanly sort, proposed that the venture be led by someone he knew would be acceptable to both sides: Nick Ayers, a senior adviser to Pence. The “outside group” is now named America First Policies. Parscale is a member, and its first national TV ads have appeared. Ayers has also been cultivating a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., who, sources say, may eventually want to lead the group himself.

The Mercers, however, have withdrawn completely. When it came to the question of whether America First should employ CA, it was Parscale’s view that prevailed: CA has no role in the group at all. “Tens beat nines in poker,” says someone involved with the formation of America First, meaning that Parscale’s close rapport with the Trump family carried greater weight than Rebekah’s connection with Bannon. Rebekah’s relationship with Jared and Ivanka is said to be diminished. Nearly every person I spoke to—Trump supporters, Cruz supporters, fellow donors, friends of Rebekah—agreed on one point: to regain some of her standing, she should fire Alexander Nix. (“We are hoping that she reads your piece and does it,” says a person she works with closely.)

On December 19, Rebekah attended a memorial service in Palm Beach for Lee Hanley, who had died four days before the election. Someone who spoke to her there was expecting her to be thrilled about the election and the position she now occupied. Instead, Rebekah was very low, says this person. She complained about John Bolton being passed over.^[5] She was also said to be furious at the appointment of Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, to chair the RNC: To Rebekah, McDaniel personified the very GOP establishment that her family had worked so hard to cast out. “She was emotional,” says the person who was there. “She was talking about how there's no rhyme or reason to the people he's appointing, and that Ivanka was acting like first lady, and Melania was very upset about it.” When asked about this, a person very close to Rebekah said, "She thinks Ivanka is wonderful and amazing and she thinks Melania is wonderful and amazing. She's very policy-oriented and not involved in personalities.”

In the end, Rebekah Mercer’s mistake was that she thought she could upend the system and then control the regime she had helped to bring to power. Helping to elect a president wasn’t enough: She wanted the machinery to shape his presidency. Instead, the chaos simply continued. An administration full of insurgents, it turns out, functions in a near-constant state of insurgency.

Bannon is said to be exhausted and stretched. He is largely responsible for the relentless pace of initiatives and executive orders in the early weeks of the administration, because he doesn’t expect to be in the White House forever. “I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” he has told friends, likening himself to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who was instrumental in enforcing Britain’s Reformation but ended up being beheaded by his boss. A source close to Bannon says that he may have “joked about being fired,” but disagreed that Bannon is tired: “I don't think he even thinks in those terms. He is used to an intense schedule.” His focus, the source says, “is working for the president to deliver on the promises to the American people for the first 100 days and then beyond on the overall agenda of Making America Great Again.” Bannon returns Rebekah’s phone calls when he can. But, according to someone who knows both well, “relations are strained.” Another person who works with both of them says, “I think Bannon, once he finally built a relationship with Trump, didn't need Rebekah as much … and he doesn't care about that. He only cares about the country.” The source close to Bannon says that Rebekah and the chief strategist remain “close friends and allies.”

As this piece was going to press, several sources warned me not to count Rebekah out. She still has a stake in Breitbart, which holds tremendous sway over Trump’s base and has recently gone on a no-holds-barred offensive against the GOP health care plan. And on March 13, Politico reported that some Trump officials were already disillusioned with America First, which they felt had been slow to provide much-needed cover for his policy initiatives. There was talk of turning instead to a new group being launched by Rebekah Mercer. And so she may yet get another chance to realize her grand ambitions. “She’s used to getting everything she wants, 100 percent of the time,” says another person who knows her well. “Does she like getting 90 percent? No.”

“I used to get so excited when the meth was all gone.”

This is my friend Jeremy.

“When you have it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh good, I can go back to my life now.’ I would stay up all weekend and go to these sex parties and then feel like shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.”

Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won’t tell me the exact circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.

Jeremy is not the friend I was expecting to have this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the kind of guy who wears a work shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. Today, when I ask him how the hospital’s been so far, the first thing he says is that there’s no Wi-Fi, he’s way behind on work emails.

“The drugs were a combination of boredom and loneliness,” he says. “I used to come home from work exhausted on a Friday night and it’s like, ‘Now what?’ So I would dial out to get some meth delivered and check the Internet to see if there were any parties happening. It was either that or watch a movie by myself.”

1. That’s not his real name. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

Jeremy^[1] is not my only gay friend who’s struggling. There’s Malcolm, who barely leaves the house except for work because his anxiety is so bad. There’s Jared, whose depression and body dysmorphia have steadily shrunk his social life down to me, the gym and Internet hookups. And there was Christian, the second guy I ever kissed, who killed himself at 32, two weeks after his boyfriend broke up with him. Christian went to a party store, rented a helium tank, started inhaling it, then texted his ex and told him to come over, to make sure he’d find the body.

1. That’s not his real name. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

For years I’ve noticed the divergence between my straight friends and my gay friends. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex.

None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family. He can’t remember ever being called a faggot. He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. “She came out to me when I was 12,” he says. “And told me two sentences later that she knew I was gay. I barely knew at that point.”

This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9. My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. They’re sweet.

Jeremy and I are 34. In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Now, it’s been enshrined in law by the Supreme Court. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2016. In pop culture, we’ve gone from “Cruising” to “Queer Eye” to “Moonlight.” Gay characters these days are so commonplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.

Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades. Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,” gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving.”

I’m not going to pretend to be objective about any of this. I’m a perpetually single gay guy who was raised in a bright blue city by PFLAG parents. I’ve never known anyone who died of AIDS, I’ve never experienced direct discrimination and I came out of the closet into a world where marriage, a picket fence and a golden retriever were not just feasible, but expected. I’ve also been in and out of therapy more times than I’ve downloaded and deleted Grindr.

“Marriage equality and the changes in legal status were an improvement for some gay men,” says Christopher Stults, a researcher at New York University who studies the differences in mental health between gay and straight men. “But for a lot of other people, it was a letdown. Like, we have this legal status, and yet there’s still something unfulfilled.”

This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in “suicidal self-harm.” In Sweden, which has had civil unions since 1995 and full marriage since 2009, men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women.

All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men. The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why.

Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies bring the closet with us into adulthood.

Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves.

“The defining feature of gay men used to be the loneliness of the closet,” he says. “But now you’ve got millions of gay men who have come out of the closet and they still feel the same isolation.”

We’re having lunch at a hole-in-the-wall noodle bar. It’s November, and he arrives wearing jeans, galoshes and a wedding ring.

“Gay-married, huh?” I say.

“Monogamous even,” he says. “I think they’re gonna give us the key to the city.”

Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10,000 people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the 21-year-olds. He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was. “I was effeminate and I was in choir,” he says. “That was enough.” So he got careful. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there.

By the late 2000s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends. He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete.

When the disparity first came to light in the ’50s and ’60s, doctors thought it was a symptom of homosexuality itself, just one of many manifestations of what was, at the time, known as “sexual inversion.” As the gay rights movement gained steam, though, homosexuality disappeared from the DSM and the explanation shifted to trauma. Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. Of course they had alarming rates of suicide and depression. “That was the idea I had, too,” Salway says, “that gay suicide was a product of a bygone era, or it was concentrated among adolescents who didn’t see any other way out.”

And then he looked at the data. The problem wasn’t just suicide, it wasn’t just afflicting teenagers and it wasn’t just happening in areas stained by homophobia. He found that gay men everywhere, at every age, have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, incontinence, erectile dysfunction,⁠ allergies and asthma—you name it, we got it. In Canada, Salway eventually discovered, more gay men were dying from suicide than from AIDS, and had been for years. (This might be the case in the U.S. too, he says, but no one has bothered to study it.)

“We see gay men who have never been sexually or physically assaulted with similar post-traumatic stress symptoms to people who have been in combat situations or who have been raped,” says Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the Fenway Institute’s Center for Population Research in LGBT Health.

Gay men are, as Keuroghlian puts it, “primed to expect rejection.” We’re constantly scanning social situations for ways we may not fit into them. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop.

The weirdest thing about these symptoms, though, is that most of us don’t see them as symptoms at all. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived.

“When you ask them why they tried to kill themselves,” he says, “most of them don’t mention anything at all about being gay.” Instead, he says, they tell him they’re having relationship problems, career problems, money problems. “They don’t feel like their sexuality is the most salient aspect of their lives. And yet, they’re an order of magnitude more likely to kill themselves.”

The term researchers use to explain this phenomenon is “minority stress.” In its most direct form, it’s pretty simple: Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort. When you’re the only woman at a business meeting, or the only black guy in your college dorm, you have to think on a level that members of the majority don’t. If you stand up to your boss, or fail to, are you playing into stereotypes of women in the workplace? If you don’t ace a test, will people think it’s because of your race? Even if you don’t experience overt stigma, considering these possibilities takes its toll over time.

For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden. Not only do we have to do all this extra work and answer all these internal questions when we’re 12, but we also have to do it without being able to talk to our friends or parents about it.

John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them. “No one has to call you queer for you to adjust your behavior to avoid being called that,” Salway says.

James, now a mostly-out 20-year-old, tells me that in seventh grade, when he was a closeted 12-year-old, a female classmate asked him what he thought about another girl. “Well, she looks like a man,” he said, without thinking, “so yeah, maybe I would have sex with her.”

Immediately, he says, he panicked. “I was like, did anyone catch that? Did they tell anyone else I said it that way?”

This is how I spent my adolescence, too: being careful, slipping up, stressing out, overcompensating. Once, at a water park, one of my middle-school friends caught me staring at him as we waited for a slide. “Dude, did you just check me out?” he said. I managed to deflect—something like “Sorry, you’re not my type”—then I spent weeks afterward worried about what he was thinking about me. But he never brought it up. All the bullying took place in my head.

“The trauma for gay men is the prolonged nature of it,” says William Elder, a sexual trauma researcher and psychologist. “If you experience one traumatic event, you have the kind of PTSD that can be resolved in four to six months of therapy. But if you experience years and years of small stressors—little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality?—that can be even worse.”

Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. At first, it’s annoying. After a while, it’s infuriating. Eventually, it’s all you can think about.

And then the stress of dealing with it every day begins to build up in your body.

Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty. A 2015 study found that gay people produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress. Their systems were so activated, so constantly, in adolescence that they ended up sluggish as grownups, says Katie McLaughlin, one of the study’s co-authors. In 2014, researchers compared straight and gay teenagers on cardiovascular risk. They found that the gay kids didn’t have a greater number of “stressful life events” (i.e. straight people have problems, too), but the ones they did experience inflicted more harm on their nervous systems.

Annesa Flentje, a stress researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, specializes in the effect of minority stress on gene expression. All those little punches combine with our adaptations to them, she says, and become “automatic ways of thinking that never get challenged or turned off, even 30 years later.” Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies bring the closet with us into adulthood. “We don’t have the tools to process stress as kids, and we don’t recognize it as trauma as adults,” says John, a former consultant who quit his job two years ago to make pottery and lead adventure tours in the Adirondacks. “Our gut reaction is to deal with things now the way we did as children.”

Even Salway, who has devoted his career to understanding minority stress, says that there are days when he feels uncomfortable walking around Vancouver with his partner. No one’s ever attacked them, but they’ve had a few assholes yell slurs at them in public. That doesn’t have to happen very many times before you start expecting it, before your heart starts beating a little faster when you see a car approaching.

But minority stress doesn’t fully explain why gay men have such a wide array of health problems. Because while the first round of damage happens before we come out of the closet, the second, and maybe more severe, comes afterward.

"You go from your mom's house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it's like, this is my community? It's like the fucking jungle."

No one ever told Adam not to act effeminate. But he, like me, like most of us, learned it somehow.

“I never worried about my family being homophobic,” he says. “I used to do this thing where I would wrap a blanket around myself like a dress and dance around in the backyard. My parents thought it was cute, so they took a video and showed it to my grandparents. When they all watched the tape, I hid behind the couch because I was so ashamed. I must have been six or seven.”

By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one suspected him of being gay. But still, he says, “I couldn’t trust anyone because I had this thing I was holding. I had to operate in the world as a lone agent.”

He came out at 16, then graduated, then moved to San Francisco and started working in HIV prevention. But the feeling of distance from other people didn’t go away. So he treated it, he says, “with lots and lots of sex. It’s our most accessible resource in the gay community. You convince yourself that if you’re having sex with someone, you’re having an intimate moment. That ended up being a crutch.”

He worked long hours. He would come home exhausted, smoke a little weed, pour a glass of red wine, then start scanning the hookup apps for someone to invite over. Sometimes it would be two or three guys in a row. “As soon as I closed the door on the last guy, I’d think, That didn’t hit the spot, then I’d find another one.”

It went on like this for years. Last Thanksgiving, he was back home to visit his parents and felt a compulsive need to have sex because he was so stressed out. When he finally found a guy nearby who was willing to hook up, he ran to his parents’ room and started rifling through their drawers to see if they had any Viagra.

“So that was the rock-bottom moment?” I ask.

“That was the third or fourth, yeah,” he says.

Adam’s now in a 12-step program for sex addiction. It’s been six weeks since he’s had sex. Before this, the longest he had ever gone was three or four days.

“There are people who have lots of sex because it’s fun, and that’s fine. But I kept trying to wring it out like a rag to get something out of it that wasn’t in there—social support, or companionship. It was a way of not dealing with my own life. And I kept denying it was a problem because I had always told myself, ‘I’ve come out, I moved to San Francisco, I’m done, I did what I had to do as a gay person.’”

For decades, this is what psychologists thought, too: that the key stages in identity formation for gay men all led up to coming out, that once we were finally comfortable with ourselves, we could begin building a life within a community of people who’d gone through the same thing. But over the last 10 years, what researchers have discovered is that the struggle to fit in only grows more intense. A study published in 2015 found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.

“It’s like you emerge from the closet expecting to be this butterfly and the gay community just slaps the idealism out of you,” Adam says. When he first started coming out, he says, “I went to West Hollywood because I thought that’s where my people were. But it was really horrifying. It’s made by gay adults, and it’s not welcoming for gay kids. You go from your mom’s house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it’s like, this is my community? It’s like the fucking jungle.”

“I came out when I was 17, and I didn’t see a place for myself in the gay scene,” says Paul, a software developer. “I wanted to fall in love like I saw straight people do in movies. But I just felt like a piece of meat. It got so bad that I used to go to the grocery store that was 40 minutes away instead of the one that was 10 minutes away just because I was so afraid to walk down the gay street.”

The word I hear from Paul, from everyone, is “re-traumatized.” You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

“Gay men in particular are just not very nice to each other,” says John, the adventure tour guide. “In pop culture, drag queens are known for their takedowns and it’s all ha ha ha. But that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. But it’s not comfortable for us to show that to other people. So we show other people what the world shows us, which is nastiness.”

Every gay man I know carries around a mental portfolio of all the shitty things other gay men have said and done to him. I arrived to a date once and the guy immediately stood up, said I was shorter than I looked in my pictures and left. Alex, a fitness instructor in Seattle, was told by a guy on his swim team, “I’ll ignore your face if you fuck me without a condom.” Martin, a Brit living in Portland, has gained maybe 10 pounds since he moved there and got a Grindr message—on Christmas Day—that said: “You used to be so sexy. It’s a shame you messed it up.”

For other minority groups, living in a community with people like them is linked to lower rates of anxiety and depression. It helps to be close to people who instinctively understand you. But for us, the effect is the opposite. Several studies have found that living in gay neighborhoods predicts higher rates of risky sex and meth use and less time spent on other community activities like volunteering or playing sports. A 2009 study suggested that gay men who were more linked to the gay community were less satisfied with their own romantic relationships.

“Gay and bisexual men talk about the gay community as a significant source of stress in their lives,” Pachankis says. The fundamental reason for this, he says, is that “in-group discrimination” does more harm to your psyche than getting rejected by members of the majority. It’s easy to ignore, roll your eyes and put a middle finger up to straight people who don’t like you because, whatever, you don’t need their approval anyway. Rejection from other gay people, though, feels like losing your only way of making friends and finding love. Being pushed away from your own people hurts more because you need them more.

The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. The first, and the one I heard most frequently, is that gay men are shitty to each other because, basically, we’re men.

“The challenges of masculinity get magnified in a community of men,” Pachankis says. “Masculinity is precarious. It has to be constantly enacted or defended or collected. We see this in studies: You can threaten masculinity among men and then look at the dumb things they do. They show more aggressive posturing, they start taking financial risks, they want to punch things.”

This helps explain the pervasive stigma against feminine guys in the gay community. According to Dane Whicker, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Duke, most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves. Maybe that’s because, historically, masculine men have been more able to blend into straight society. Or maybe it’s internalized homophobia: Feminine gay men are still stereotyped as bottoms, the receptive partner in anal sex.

A two-year longitudinal study found that the longer gay men were out of the closet, the more likely they were to become versatile or tops. Researchers say this kind of training, deliberately trying to appear more masculine and taking on a different sex role, is just one of the ways gay men pressure each other to attain “sexual capital,” the equivalent of going to the gym or plucking our eyebrows.

“The only reason I started working out was so I would seem like a feasible top,” Martin says. When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. “So I started faking all this hyper-masculine behavior. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. That’s a remnant of my first few years out of the closet, when I thought I had to speak in this Christian Bale Batman voice to get dates.”

Grant, a 21-year-old who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, says he used to be self-conscious about the way he stood—hands on hips, one leg slightly cocked like a Rockette. So, his sophomore year, he started watching his male teachers for their default positions, deliberately standing with his feet wide, his arms at his sides.

These masculinity norms exert a toll on everyone, even their perpetrators. Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness. Masculine gay men, for their part, are more anxious, have more risky sex and use drugs and tobacco with greater frequency. One study investigating why living in the gay community increases depression found that the effect only showed up in masculine gay guys.

The second reason the gay community acts as a unique stressor on its members is not about why we reject each other, but how.

In the last 10 years, traditional gay spaces—bars, nightclubs, bathhouses—have begun to disappear, and have been replaced by social media. At least 70 percent of gay men now use hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff to meet each other. In 2000, around 20 percent of gay couples met online. By 2010, that was up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of gay couples who met through friends dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent.

Usually when you hear about the shocking primacy of hookup apps in gay life—Grindr, the most popular, says its average user spends 90 minutes per day on it—it’s in some panicked media story about murderers or homophobes trawling them for victims, or about the troubling “chemsex” scenes that have sprung up in London and New York. And yes, those are problems. But the real effect of the apps is quieter, less remarked-upon and, in a way, more profound: For many of us, they have become the primary way we interact with other gay people.

“It’s so much easier to meet someone for a hookup on Grindr than it is to go to a bar by yourself,” Adam says. “Especially if you’ve just moved to a new city, it’s so easy to let the dating apps become your social life. It’s harder to look for social situations where you might have to make more of an effort.”

“I have moments when I want to feel desired and so I get on Grindr,” Paul says. “I upload a shirtless picture and I start getting these messages telling me I’m hot. It feels good in the moment, but nothing ever comes of it, and those messages stop coming after a few days. It feels like I’m scratching an itch, but it’s scabies. It’s just going to spread.”

The worst thing about the apps, though, and why they’re relevant to the health disparity between gay and straight men, is not just that we use them a lot. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves. In interviews that Elder, the post-traumatic stress researcher, conducted with gay men in 2015, he found that 90 percent said they wanted a partner who was tall, young, white, muscular and masculine. For the vast majority of us who barely meet one of those criteria, much less all five, the hookup apps merely provide an efficient way to feel ugly.

Paul says he’s “electrified waiting for rejection” as soon as he opens them. John, the former consultant, is 27, 6-foot-1 and has a six-pack you can see through his wool sweater. And even he says most of his messages don’t get replies, that he spends probably 10 hours talking to people on the app for every one hour he spends meeting for coffee or a hookup.

It’s worse for gay men of color. Vincent, who runs counseling sessions with black and Latino men through the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the apps give racial minorities two forms of feedback: Rejected (“Sorry, I’m not into black guys”) and fetishized (“Hi, I’m really into black guys.”) Paihan, a Taiwanese immigrant in Seattle, shows me his Grindr inbox. It is, like mine, mostly hellos he has sent out to no reply. One of the few messages he received just says, “Asiiiaaaan.”

None of this is new, of course. Walt Odets, a psychologist who’s been writing about social isolation since the 1980s, says that gay men used to be troubled by the bathhouses in the same way they are troubled by Grindr now. The difference he sees in his younger patients is that “if someone rejected you at a bathhouse, you could still have a conversation afterwards. Maybe you end up with a friend out of it, or at least something that becomes a positive social experience. On the apps, you just get ignored if someone doesn’t perceive you as a sexual or romantic conquest.” The gay men I interviewed talked about the dating apps the same way straight people talk about Comcast: It sucks, but what are you gonna do? “You have to use the apps in smaller cities,” says Michael Moore, a psychologist at Yale. “They serve the purpose of a gay bar. But the downside is that they put all this prejudice out there.”

What the apps reinforce, or perhaps simply accelerate, is the adult version of what Pachankis calls the Best Little Boy in the World Hypothesis. As kids, growing up in the closet makes us more likely to concentrate our self-worth into whatever the outside world wants us to be—good at sports, good at school, whatever. As adults, the social norms in our own community pressure us to concentrate our self-worth even further—into our looks, our masculinity, our sexual performance. But then, even if we manage to compete there, even if we attain whatever masc-dom-top ideal we’re looking for, all we’ve really done is condition ourselves to be devastated when we inevitably lose it.

“We often live our lives through the eyes of others,” says Alan Downs, a psychologist and the author of The Velvet Rage, a book about gay men’s struggle with shame and social validation. “We want to have man after man, more muscles, more status, whatever brings us fleeting validation. Then we wake up at 40, exhausted, and we wonder, Is that all there is? And then the depression comes.”

Our distance from the mainstream is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke.

Perry Halkitis, a professor at NYU, has been studying the health gap between gay people and straight people since the early ’90s. He has published four books on gay culture and has interviewed men dying of HIV, recovering from party drugs and struggling to plan their own weddings.

That’s why, two years ago, his 18-year-old nephew James showed up trembling at his doorstep. He sat Halkitis and his husband down on the couch and announced he was gay. “We told him, ‘Congratulations, your membership card and welcome package are in the other room,’” Halkitis remembers. “But he was too nervous to get the joke.”

James grew up in Queens, a beloved member of a big, affectionate, liberal family. He went to a public school with openly gay kids. “And still,” Halkitis says, “there was this emotional turmoil. He knew rationally that everything was going to be fine, but being in the closet isn’t rational, it’s emotional.”

Over the years, James had convinced himself that he would never come out. He didn’t want the attention, or to have to field questions he couldn’t answer. His sexuality didn’t make sense to him—how could he possibly explain it to other people? “On TV I was seeing all these traditional families,” he tells me. “At the same time, I was watching a ton of gay porn, where everyone was super ripped and single and having sex all the time. So I thought those were my two options: this fairy-tale life I could never have, or this gay life where there was no romance.”

James remembers the exact moment he decided to go into the closet. He must have been 10 or 11, dragged on a vacation to Long Island by his parents. “I looked around at our whole family, and the kids running around, and I thought, ‘I’m never going to have this,’ and I started to cry.”

I realize, the second he says it, that he is describing the same revelation I had at his age, the same grief. James’ was in 2007. Mine was in 1992. Halkitis says his was in 1977. Surprised that someone his nephew’s age could have the same experience he did, Halkitis decided his next book project would be about the trauma of the closet.

“Even now, even in New York City, even with accepting parents, the coming out process is challenging," Halkitis says. “Maybe it always will be.”

So what are we supposed to do about it? When we think of marriage laws or hate crime prohibitions, we tend to think of them as protections of our rights. What’s less understood is that laws literally affect our health.

One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in 2004 and 2005, the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Gay men in those states showed a 37 percent increase in mood disorders, a 42 percent increase in alcoholism and a 248 percent increase in generalized anxiety disorder.

The most chilling thing about those numbers is that the legal rights of gay people living in those states didn’t materially change. We couldn’t get married in Michigan before the amendment passed, and we couldn’t get married in Michigan after it passed. The laws were symbolic. They were the majority’s way of informing gay people that we weren’t wanted. What’s worse, the rates of anxiety and depression didn’t just jump in the states that passed constitutional amendments. They increased (though less dramatically) among gay people across the entire country. The campaign to make us suffer worked.

Now square that with the fact that our country recently elected a bright orange Demogorgon whose administration is publicly, eagerly attempting to reverse every single gain the gay community has made in the last 20 years. The message this sends to gay people—especially the youngest ones, just grappling with their identity—couldn’t be clearer and more terrifying.

Any discussion of gay mental health has to start with what happens in schools. Despite the progress taking place around them, America’s educational institutions remain dangerous places for kids, filled with aspiring frat boys, indifferent teachers and retrograde policies. Emily Greytak, the director of research for the anti-bullying organization GLSEN, tells me that from 2005 to 2015, the percentage of teenagers who said they were bullied for their sexual orientation didn’t fall at all. Only around 30 percent of school districts in the country have anti-bullying policies that specifically mention LGBTQ kids, and thousands of other districts have policies that prevent teachers from speaking about homosexuality in a positive way.

These restrictions make it so much harder for kids to cope with their minority stress. But luckily, this doesn’t require every teacher and every teenage lacrosse bro to accept gay people overnight. For the last four years, Nicholas Heck, a researcher at Marquette University, has been running support groups for gay kids in high schools. He walks them through their interactions with their classmates, their teachers and their parents, and tries to help them separate garden-variety teenage stress from the kind they get due to their sexuality. One of his kids, for example, was under pressure from his parents to major in art rather than finance. His parents meant well—they were just trying to encourage him into a field where he would encounter fewer homophobes—but he was already anxious: If he gave up on finance, was that surrendering to stigma? If he went into art and still got bullied, could he tell his parents about it?

The trick, Heck says, is getting kids to ask these questions openly, because one of the hallmark symptoms of minority stress is avoidance. Kids hear derogatory comments in the hall so they decide to walk down another one, or they put in earbuds. They ask a teacher for help and get shrugged off, so they stop looking for safe adults altogether. But the kids in the study, Heck says, are already starting to reject the responsibility they used to take on when they got bullied. They’re learning that even if they can’t change the environment around them, they’re allowed to stop blaming themselves for it.

So for kids, the goal is to hunt out and prevent minority stress. But what can be done for those of us who have already internalized it?

“There has been a lot of work with queer youth, but there’s no equivalent when you’re in your 30s and 40s,” Salway tells me. “I don’t even know where you go.” The problem, he says, is that we’ve built entirely separate infrastructures around mental illness, HIV prevention and substance abuse, even though all the evidence indicates that they are not three epidemics, but one. People who feel rejected are more likely to self-medicate, which makes them more likely to have risky sex, which makes them more likely to contract HIV, which makes them more likely to feel rejected, and so on.

In the last five years, as evidence of this interconnectedness has piled up, a few psychologists and epidemiologists have started to treat alienation among gay men as a “syndemic”: A cluster of health problems, none of which can be fixed on their own.

Pachankis, the stress researcher, just ran the country’s first randomized controlled trial of “gay-affirming” cognitive behavior therapy. After years of emotional avoidance, many gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling,” he says. Their partner says “I love you” and they reply “Well, I love pancakes.” They break it off with the guy they’re seeing because he leaves a toothbrush at their house. Or, like a lot of the guys I talked to, they have unprotected sex with someone they’ve never met because they don’t know how to listen to their own trepidation.

Emotional detachment of this kind is pervasive, Pachankis says, and many of the men he works with go years without recognizing that the things they’re striving for—having a perfect body, doing more and better work than their colleagues, curating the ideal weeknight Grindr hookup—are reinforcing their own fear of rejection.

Simply pointing out these patterns yielded huge results: Pachankis’ patients showed reduced rates of anxiety, depression, drug use and condom-less sex in just three months. He’s now expanding the study to include more cities, more participants and a longer timeline.

These solutions are promising, but they’re still imperfect. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the mental health gap between straight people and gay people close, at least not fully. There will always be more straight kids than gay kids, we will always be isolated among them, and we will always, on some level, grow up alone in our families and our schools and our towns. But perhaps that’s not all bad. Our distance from the mainstream may be the source of some of what ails us, but it is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke. We have to recognize that as we fight for better laws and better environments—and as we figure out how to be better to each other.

I keep thinking of something Paul, the software developer, told me: “For gay people, we’ve always told ourselves that when the AIDS epidemic was over we’d be fine. Then it was, when we can get married we’ll be fine. Now it’s, when the bullying stops we’ll be fine. We keep waiting for the moment when we feel like we’re not different from other people. But the fact is, we are different. It’s about time we accept that and work with it.”

All Sarah Loiselle wanted was a carefree summer. There was no particular reason she was feeling restless, but she’d been single for about a year and her job working with cardiac patients in upstate New York could be intense. So when she learned that a Delaware hospital needed temporary nurses, she leapt at the chance to spend a summer by the beach. In June 2011, the tall, bubbly 32-year-old drove her Jeep into the sleepy coastal town of Lewes. She and her poodle, Aries, moved into a rustic apartment above a curiosity shop that once housed the town jail. The place was so close to the bay that she could go sunbathing on her days off. It didn’t bother Loiselle that she’d be away from her friends and family for a while: She felt like she’d put her real life on hold, that she was blissfully free of all her responsibilities.

And then she met a guy. She’d never dated online before, but an acquaintance convinced her to try a site called PlentyOfFish. Loiselle, who has a slender face framed by auburn hair, soon found herself messaging with 36-year-old Andrel Martinez, a muscular Delaware state trooper. She was intrigued enough to drive an hour with him to Ocean City, Maryland, for what she thought was a great date: They had dinner, strolled along the beach and danced at a waterfront club. Right away she noticed Martinez’s height (he is more than 6 feet tall) and the way he carried himself, with a confidence she would come to associate with cops. Loiselle was hardly a meek person, but his presence made her feel safe. She thought it was sweet when he reached back through a crowd to take her hand.

They started seeing each other regularly. And as the summer went by, Loiselle began to feel like she could really trust him. One night over dinner, she talked about her family. Loiselle had left home young, after she’d become pregnant at 18. She’d placed her baby up for adoption—but she was proud that she was still in touch with her daughter, whose birthday was tattooed on her hip. That night, Loiselle said, Martinez got choked up and said he loved her and wanted to be with her so they could turn their lives “into something beautiful.” When her contract was up at the end of the summer, Loiselle found a new job and stayed in Delaware.

Sarah Loiselle felt like she could really trust Andrel Martinez. PAULA BAIRD MIGNOGNO

They moved in together, talked about having a child. But as the months grew colder, doubts crept in. Some of Loiselle’s new friends found Martinez overbearing. Stephanie Botti, whom she met through work, went to a club with the new couple and recalled Martinez “getting all weird about these guys who want nothing to do with us,” inserting himself between them with “aggressive body language.” Loiselle noticed that he seemed to be constantly questioning her or telling her what to do—probably a cop thing, she figured. And she didn’t like it when, she said, Martinez would talk disparagingly about her daughter’s adoption. By the winter, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to break up with him. But she thought it might be a good idea to check out a few apartments, just in case.

She was on her way to look at a place when Martinez called. Loiselle came up with some cover story, but when she got home, she said, his police car was parked in the driveway. That surprised her, because she’d thought he was supposed to be at work. When she walked into the darkened kitchen, she said, she found Martinez standing there, his hands resting on his gun belt. “Where were you?” he asked. Before she could answer, she said, he made a comment about the very building she’d just visited. He said he’d just happened to see her there. That was when she realized that leaving him might be harder than she’d anticipated.

He would stand and stare at her, using what she called his “interrogation voice.”

When Loiselle discovered she was pregnant, in January 2012, she decided to try to make the relationship work. But Martinez “had this expectation of the woman of the house,” she said. “He wanted me to be super fun and hot and sexy and meet all of his needs. I was pregnant and felt like crap.” At one point, she said, Martinez gave her a self-help book for police wives. The message seemed pretty obvious to her: She needed to get in line, to be more supportive of her man.

In September they had a daughter, whom we’ll call Jasmine. But after the birth, Loiselle and Martinez fought a lot. Martinez has said that Loiselle would belittle him and call him worthless. Loiselle’s friends, meanwhile, thought he was controlling. She “needed to do what he wanted her to do,” Botti observed. “Otherwise he was going to escalate.” Another friend, Danielle Gilbert, said, “If Sarah was somewhere with me, he would have to know where she was, or if she didn’t tell him, he would find out, which I found really odd. I was like, ‘Does he have somebody spying on you? Is he spying on you?’”

Loiselle was increasingly unnerved by how quickly Martinez could swing from sweet and loving to angry and sullen. On one occasion, she said, he held her down and dug his fingers into her neck to demonstrate pressure points. When she started crying and asked him to stop, he laughed, saying he was just playing around, she recalled. He called her a “motherfucking cunt” or a “bitch,” she said, and would stand and stare at her, using what she called his “interrogation voice.” She believed he knew precisely how much pressure, mental or physical, he needed to exert to make her do exactly what he wanted. And she had a gnawing fear of what might happen if she didn’t comply.  

If domestic abuse is one of the most underreported crimes, domestic abuse by police officers is virtually an invisible one. It is frighteningly difficult to track or prevent—and it has escaped America’s most recent awakening to the many ways in which some police misuse their considerable powers. Very few people in the United States understand what really happens when an officer is accused of harassing, stalking, or assaulting a partner. One person who knows more than most is a 62-year-old retired cop named Mark Wynn.

Wynn decided to be a police officer when he was about 5 years old because he wanted to put his stepfather in prison. Alvin Griffin was a violent alcoholic who terrorized Wynn’s mother, a waitress and supermarket butcher. Looking back, Wynn compares his childhood in Dallas to living inside a crime scene. “There was always blood in my house,” he said.

The cops sometimes showed up, usually after a neighbor called to complain about the screaming, but they didn’t do much. Wynn doesn’t remember them ever talking to him or his four siblings. He does remember clinging to his mother while a police officer threatened to arrest her if they had to come back to the house again. “There was no one to help us,” he said. “We were completely isolated.” Wynn has often spoken of the time he tried to kill his stepfather when he was 7—how he and his brother emptied out the Mad Dog wine on Griffin’s bedside dresser and replaced it with Black Flag bug spray. A few hours later, Griffin downed the bottle as the boys waited in the living room. Griffin didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the wine. But he didn’t die, either.

Years later, when Wynn was around 13 and all but one of his siblings had left home, he was watching television when he heard a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot. He found his mother splayed on the floor of their tiny kitchen, blood pooling around her face. Griffin had knocked her out with a punch to the head. Wynn watched as Griffin stepped over her, opened the fridge, pulled out a can of beer and drank it. That night, Griffin got locked up for public drunkenness and Wynn, his sister and his mother finally got out, driving to Tennessee with a few belongings. Griffin never found them.

Mark Wynn with his stepfather, Alvin Griffin, in 1961. COURTESY OF MARK WYNN

Wynn became a police officer in the late 1970s and after a few years, he wound up in Nashville. Then as now, domestic complaints tended to be one of the most common calls fielded by police. And Wynn was disturbed to find that he was expected to handle them in much the same way as the cops from his childhood had—treat it as a family matter, don’t get involved. He remembers that officers would write cursory summaries on 3 by 5 inch “miscellaneous incident” cards rather than full reports. To fit what he regarded as essential details in the tiny space provided, Wynn would print “really, really small,” he said. “The officers I worked with used to get pissed off at me,” he added. They couldn’t understand why he bothered.

But Wynn had entered the force at a pivotal moment. In the late 1970s, women’s groups had turned domestic violence into a major national cause, and abused women successfully sued police departments for failing to protect them. Over the next decade, states passed legislation empowering police to make arrests in domestic incidents and to enforce protective orders. Wynn eagerly embraced these changes and in the late 1980s, the Department of Justice asked him to train police chiefs on best practices. He went on to lead one of the country’s first specialized investigative units for family violence. By the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which poured more than $1 billion into shelters and law enforcement training, the U.S. was finally starting to treat domestic violence as a crime. “It was like stepping out of the Dark Ages,” Wynn said.

And yet when officers themselves were the accused, cases tended to be handled in the old way. Wynn would hear stories around his station, like an assailant who received a quiet talk from a colleague instead of being arrested. “Officers thought they were taking care of their fellow officer,” said David Thomas, a former police officer and a consultant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). “But what they were doing was colluding with a criminal.”

It is nearly impossible to calculate the frequency of domestic crimes committed by police—not least because victims are often reluctant to seek help from their abuser’s colleagues. Another complication is the 1996 Lautenberg Amendment, a federal law that prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning a gun. The amendment is a valuable protection for most women. But a police officer who can’t use a gun can’t work—and so reporting him may risk the family’s livelihood as well as the abuser’s anger. Courts can be perilous to navigate, too, since police intimately understand their workings and often have relationships with prosecutors and judges. Police are also some of the only people who know the confidential locations of shelters. Diane Wetendorf, a domestic violence counselor who wrote a handbook for women whose abusers work in law enforcement, believes they are among the most vulnerable victims in the country.

In 1991, a researcher at Arizona State University testified to a congressional committee about a survey she’d conducted of more than 700 police officers. Forty percent admitted that they had “behaved violently against their spouse and children” in the past six months (although the study didn’t define “violence.”) In a 1992 survey of 385 male officers, 28 percent admitted to acts of physical aggression against a spouse in the last year—including pushing, kicking, hitting, strangling and using a knife or gun. Both studies cautioned that the real numbers could be even higher; there has been startlingly little research since.  

Even counting arrests of officers for domestic crimes is no simple undertaking, because there are no government statistics. Jonathan Blanks, a Cato Institute researcher who publishes a daily roundup of police misconduct, said that in the thousands of news reports he has compiled, domestic violence is “the most common violent crime for which police officers are arrested.” And yet most of the arrested officers appear to keep their jobs.

Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, uses an elaborate set of Google news alerts to identify arrests of law enforcement personnel and then attempts to track the outcome through news reports and court records. Between 2005 and 2012, he found 1,143 cases in which an officer was arrested for a crime of domestic violence. While he emphasized that his data is incomplete, he discovered convictions in only 30 percent of the cases. In 38 percent, officers either resigned or were fired and in 17 percent, he found no evidence of adverse consequences at all. Stinson noted that it wasn’t uncommon for police to be extended a “professional courtesy” in the form of a lesser charge that might help them avoid the Lautenberg Amendment. Officers could be booked for disorderly conduct instead of domestic assault. If they were charged with domestic violence, the prosecutor might allow them to plead to a different offense. Stinson has identified dozens of officers who are still working even after being convicted.

Through public records requests, we also obtained hundreds of internal domestic abuse complaints made about police officers between 2014 and 2016 in 8 of the 10 largest cities in the country. Officers can be penalized internally whether or not criminal charges are filed—although the penalties may be minor and many complaints are not substantiated. An ABC 7 investigation this February found that nine of every 10 domestic violence allegations made against Chicago police officers by spouses or children resulted in no disciplinary action.

What is striking in many of the internal complaints, as well as incidents we found in news reports, is the degree of alleged violence and how often it appears to coincide with the misuse of police authority. An officer in New Jersey was indicted in January after he allegedly used his identification to enter the hotel room of a woman he was dating, fired a gun in her direction, assaulted her to get her to recant a statement, and attacked an officer who was working with investigators. He pleaded not guilty. So did a veteran Cleveland officer who was arrested the same month for allegedly beating his girlfriend with his service gun, firing shots near her head, then sexually assaulting her at gunpoint. Last September, an officer in Indiana was arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend for years—after previously alleging that she had abused him. (The case has not yet gone to trial.) And in 2013, a San Antonio police officer allegedly hit his wife with a gun and pointed it at his children. He ultimately pleaded no-contest to “making an obscene gesture.” Because he was not convicted of a domestic violence offense, he kept his officer’s license.

Despite the scarcity of data, the IACP has acknowledged that domestic violence is likely “at least” as prevalent within police families as in the general population. Which is significant: One third of women are estimated to experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by a partner during their lifetime. This is why, since the late 1990s, Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive officers and persuading police departments to address it. As he sees it, the issue triggers every possible defensive instinct a cop might possess: romantic, protective, fraternal, tribal: “It’s the last frontier of policing.”

The first time that Sarah Loiselle tried to get help was March 21, 2013. Some days earlier, she’d been preparing to give Jasmine a bath. Then, she said, Martinez informed her that he wanted to do it. By her account, he took the baby from her arms and, when she tried to follow him into the bathroom, pushed her out and shut the door. It felt to her like he was demonstrating that he was in total control. Around this time, she emailed a therapist the couple had been seeing. “[I am] starting to become afraid for our safety and going to separate from him,” she wrote. After she quietly moved the base of Jasmine’s car seat out of Martinez’s vehicle, she said, he started questioning her in his interrogation voice again: What did you go outside for? Where are you going to go? That night, she lay in bed in the guest room, heart pounding. “It’s like a grizzly is in front of you,” she recalled. “Get down, cover your head with your hands and hope he stops.” She left with Jasmine the next morning while Martinez was still sleeping and went straight to the family courthouse.   

There, staff explained Loiselle’s options: Under Delaware law, the state could confiscate Martinez’s firearms if she were granted a protective order. Afraid of making him even angrier if something happened to his job, she decided not to file. That night, she sent him a text message:

In another message he added:

The next day, Loiselle was blindsided when Martinez filed for emergency custody of Jasmine. He called Loiselle emotionally unstable and said he was worried for his daughter’s safety. Among other things, he cited the fact that Loiselle had placed her first child up for adoption. Loiselle filed for a protective order, describing the bathroom incident and other behavior that had made her frightened to stay with him. (She later detailed her allegation that he used pressure points on her in a separate proceeding.) Eventually, she dropped her petition in exchange for 50-50 custody of Jasmine, she said.

For a while, Loiselle stayed with a friend, Paula Mignogno, who recalled that they tried to park Loiselle’s car where it couldn’t be seen from the road. But then Loiselle started hearing from various people that Martinez was looking for her. He showed up in uniform at the hospital where she used to work, according to a nurse who asked not to be named out of concern for her safety. As a police officer, Martinez was able to get into the ER, where the nurse said he cornered her in a utility room full of soiled linens and demanded to know where Loiselle and Jasmine were. She pushed past him, she said, and Martinez followed, yelling that he would find out one way or another. Feeling threatened, the nurse contacted Martinez’s station. “I was basically told that this was a domestic issue, it has nothing to do with his job, it has nothing to do with Delaware State Police,” she said.

By April 2013, Loiselle was living about a five-minute drive from Martinez’s house. She’d chosen the location so they could exchange their daughter before work, she said. The couple’s babysitter, Brielle Blemle, said she saw Martinez parked on the main road outside the apartment complex more than once. Loiselle bought blinds. Another time, Blemle said, a state trooper’s vehicle briefly followed her as she left Loiselle’s place. “There was literally nothing we could do,” she said. “And Sarah did try.” Loiselle and the nurse made complaints with Martinez's station. Loiselle said she also left several messages there but got no response. (Her lawyer, however, received a letter from Martinez’s attorney instructing Loiselle and her “friend” to stop making allegations of stalking or harassment to the state police.) Then, in May, Loiselle was shopping in Walmart when Martinez suddenly showed up in the baby food aisle. He insisted it was a coincidence, but after a tense exchange Loiselle called the police, to establish some kind of official record. This time, she contacted a large dispatch center instead of Martinez’s station. But the Walmart encounter didn’t give police much to go on, and after interviewing Martinez, they took no further action.

An abusive officer, said David Thomas, a police consultant, is “a master manipulator with a Ph.D.”

The couple briefly reconciled later in the summer, but Martinez’s controlling behavior surfaced again, Loiselle said. One of her few close friends in the area, Cortney Lewis, recalled that Loiselle was uncharacteristically timid around him. Lewis, a no-nonsense hairdresser in her early twenties, also got the impression Martinez only wanted Loiselle to be friends with the wives of his own close buddies. Then, in early 2014, some months after Loiselle and Martinez had finally split up for good, Lewis heard that Loiselle had been asking a lot of personal questions about her. She wanted to know, for instance, whether Lewis or one of her relatives had ever been in trouble with the police. Furious, Lewis confronted her friend, and Loiselle explained that Martinez had raised some concerns about her family. Lewis wondered: Had Martinez been looking up private information about her in police databases? She decided to report her suspicions, even though Loiselle begged her not to “poke the bear.” “He’s not the fucking president,” Lewis said.

On January 15, 2014 Loiselle was at home when there was an unexpected knock on her door. The man standing outside introduced himself as Sergeant Jeffrey Whitmarsh. He was wearing dress clothes, not a uniform, and Loiselle started shaking. She brought Whitmarsh into her living room, where her daughter’s toys were scattered all over the floor and just stared at him, afraid that he was there to somehow protect Martinez or his department.

Whitmarsh tried to put her at ease. “I can’t put myself in your shoes Sarah, I just can’t,” he told her, according to a transcript of the conversation. He explained that he had been investigating Lewis’s complaint. He also made a point of saying that he worked about an hour and a half away, so he didn’t know law enforcement people in this part of the state. Whitmarsh opened a binder and showed Loiselle some printouts, which he said were only a snapshot of searches Martinez had run in DELJIS, the Delaware police database that houses close to 12 million records, including addresses, car tags, driver’s licenses, fingerprints, arrest history, protective orders, police reports, even nicknames. Loiselle had trouble focusing. She had suspected that Martinez might be using his police authority to keep track of her, but never anything like this. As she tried to keep it together, Whitmarsh said, “The concern I have [is]: How far he is going to learn as much as he can about you?”

Ultimately, Loiselle would learn that Martinez had looked up vehicle registrations on cars parked inside her apartment complex on fifteen dates and had run searches on the owners, according to the Delaware State Police. Police also said that between July 2012 and December 2013, Martinez had run or attempted dozens of searches—on Loiselle, her friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances, ex-boyfriend, Facebook friends, a day care provider and the nurse at the hospital, among others. And he had searched for information on his new girlfriend, too. When exchanging Jasmine, Loiselle had sometimes caught glimpses of her—a woman with blonde hair in a banana clip, hidden behind the tinted windows of Martinez’s car.

In 2011, Karen Tingle was working as an emergency medical technician not far from Lewes. She had been a 911 dispatcher for years before realizing that she wanted to be the person responding to the distress call, not the person picking up the phone. She adored her job, but she was also a bit lonely. At 34, she had two children and three ex-husbands—the result, she thought, of an overly trusting nature. “I always look for the best in people,” she said. “You can tell me something and I will believe you until I have a good reason to know otherwise.”

That October, not long after Loiselle had first moved in with Martinez, Tingle had profiles on Match and PlentyOfFish. In pictures, she looked toned and tan, with a slender face framed by thick blonde hair. When she got a message from a guy called Andrel Martinez, she recognized him—he was a state trooper she knew of through work. He was also Tingle’s type: a strong personality with a protective side. On their first date, he seemed gentle and funny. When Martinez started dropping by the ambulance station with a cup of coffee or a Butterfinger bar, Tingle was flattered. Her best friend and fellow EMT, Jackie Marshall, recalls him showing up “pretty much every shift.”

“I always look for the best in people,” Karen Tingle said. MELISSA JELTSEN

They dated casually for almost a year, Tingle said, although they sometimes went for extended periods without seeing each other. Tingle attributed this to the demands of Martinez’s job, but whenever she pressed for more commitment, he told her he wasn’t ready, she said. Then one day in the summer of 2012, Tingle was killing time between calls when a colleague said she’d heard Martinez had gotten a woman pregnant. Apparently, they were having a baby shower the very next day. The co-worker, who asked not to be named, said Tingle was visibly stunned. Tingle later learned that the rumor was true and that the woman’s name was Sarah Loiselle.

Martinez didn’t deny the pregnancy, Tingle recalled, but told her that it happened after a one-night stand and that he hardly even knew Loiselle. Tingle stopped seeing him, but said they started dating again about six months after the baby was born. Almost immediately, Tingle got pregnant.

They were separated for most of Tingle’s pregnancy. During this period, she was crushed to learn that Loiselle hadn’t been a random hookup at all. She and Martinez had dated seriously, even lived together—and now they seemed to be seeing each other again. And yet after Martinez and Loiselle broke up for the last time, Tingle decided to forgive him. She didn’t want to raise another child alone and she thought Martinez would be a good father. She started living in the house he’d once shared with Loiselle in the winter of 2013. Days before Christmas, Tingle gave birth to a girl we’ll call Kate, with Martinez by her side.

But Loiselle remained a constant presence in their lives. Tingle recalled Martinez telling her that his ex-girlfriend was a “vindictive female” who was making up vicious lies in order to take his child. She was moved by how relentlessly he was fighting for Jasmine—Loiselle must be a real piece of work, she thought. Her mother, Janice Arney, was outraged, too. “He led us to believe that Sarah was a horrible mother, and he was trying, through the court system, to get [Jasmine] away from her,” Arney said. Once, Tingle recalled, Martinez had gone into a Walmart while she stayed in the car. After he came out, Tingle said, they were still in the parking lot when Martinez got a tip-off on his phone from a police dispatcher: Loiselle had just called the cops on him. (Loiselle said she heard about this from Martinez himself, who bragged to her that he had “friends who look out for him.” The dispatcher and the Delaware State Police declined to comment.)

One day in January 2014, two state police officers showed up at the house to tell Martinez he was being suspended with pay and had to turn over his gun and badge immediately. Tingle couldn’t understand what was happening, although she suspected it must have something to do with Loiselle. Still, she did her best to keep things normal. Martinez, an enthusiastic cook, whipped up steaks or Cuban sandwiches for family dinners. But in March, the couple were driving to pick up Tingle’s oldest daughter, who we'll call Kristen, when a police minivan loomed behind them, lights flashing. In Tingle’s recollection, Martinez pulled over to let the van pass but it stayed on him. He stopped the car, got out and learned that he was being arrested. By the time Tingle got home, it was full of police searching for evidence.

Martinez was charged with harassment and felony stalking, as well as 60 counts stemming from his DELJIS searches of Loiselle and others, according to a criminal complaint. Still, Tingle stood by Martinez: As far as she was concerned, Loiselle was crazy. Four days later, Martinez was placed on suspension without pay and benefits. He was at home all the time. That was when, Tingle said, his temper got worse.

A few months after his arrest, he cornered Tingle against a wall and punched through it next to her head, she said. It was the first time he’d done anything like that, and when he promised it would never happen again, she believed him. She didn’t feel like she could abandon him when he was under such terrible stress—and she badly wanted Kate to have a father. That spring, they moved out of Martinez’s place and into her home on the corner of her parents’ farm to save money. Her mother bought a tricycle for the kids; the family sometimes roasted weenies at a firepit by a small pond. In June 2014, at a clerk of the peace, Tingle and Martinez got married.

On a dreary Friday earlier this year, Mark Wynn was pacing in front of a group of police officers and prosecutors in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. He’d warmed up the audience with a few well-worn jokes in his mellow drawl, and now he was getting to the tricky part. “This can be kinda weird. Stay with me now,” he said. “This, in my mind, is who people of policing are.” He reeled off a list of characteristics that officers are encouraged to master—to control their emotions, to interrogate when suspicious, to match aggression when challenged, to dominate when threatened. These hard-won habits were “a good thing,” he reassured the group. But they could also “super-charge” abusive officers. “You got an offender in the ranks—man, you got a mess on your hands,” he concluded. “Because they now are using what you gave them to be a better abuser, no question about it.”

Police officers can find their instincts hard to turn off when they leave the station—a phenomenon known as “authoritarian spillover.” Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, still finds himself slipping into “cop mode,” although he hasn’t been a police officer in more than a decade. When he was still on the force, Stoughton once became convinced his wife was lying about a big scratch on their car. “Let me be clear, I interrogated her using a number of the techniques I had learned as a cop,” he said. “It was not a good scene.” It also turned out that he was wrong, and to this day, the memory makes him uneasy. (His wife, Alisa, said she “felt very attacked and uncomfortable. I had never seen that side of Seth before.”)

Because police are trained to use a continuum of force that starts with non-physical tactics and ends with lethal violence, behavior that seems routine to them can be terrifying for family members. Punching or grappling, for instance, might only rank a 5 or a 6 on the use-of-force scale, wrote Ellen Kirschman in a book for law enforcement families called I Love A Cop. But for family, yelling might feel like a four and pushing could be a 7. One study of more than 1,000 Baltimore police officers found that officers with stronger authoritarian attitudes—such as a need for “unquestioning obedience”—were more likely to be violent toward a partner.  

Since the late 1990s, Mark Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive police officers. Courtesy of Mark Wynn

Wynn is careful to emphasize that police work doesn’t turn people into abusers. He has come to believe that the most dangerous offenders are those who enter the force with abusive tendencies, which are intensified by the job and the power that comes with it. Officers learn “command presence”—how to control a situation by physically and verbally projecting strength. They are taught to dominate suspects with precise techniques like digging into a pressure point or locking a wrist. They possess access to databases and other resources that can be used to facilitate abuse—license plate data, for instance, could be used to closely monitor a person’s travel patterns. They may even be capable of locating a person if she changes her name or social security number. An abusive police officer, said David Thomas, the IACP consultant, is “a master manipulator with a Ph.D.”

“So the question is, ‘Do we break the code?’” Wynn asked his audience. Over the years, he’d come across numerous cases of officers protecting their own—arriving at court in uniform to intimidate a victim, driving by the house of a colleague’s wife to report on her movements. But the urge to shelter a fellow officer, he cautioned, isn’t necessarily sinister. He recalled once assigning a detective to investigate abuse allegations against a colleague. The detective looked at the file and blanched: The officer in question had saved his life, twice. Wynn knew what that meant. He put another detective on the case.

One potential solution is to establish a mandatory procedure to be followed when an officer is accused of abuse, covering everyone from the responding officer to the chief. “You cannot treat this case like any other case,” said Wynn, who has been lobbying police chiefs since 1999 to adopt a policy developed by the IACP. And yet most departments don’t have such a protocol. (The Delaware State Police wouldn’t comment on whether it has one.) Ultimately, Wynn believes that the most effective solution of all is to screen prospective police officers for any history of domestic violence or sexual misconduct. He also advises departments to check whether they have protective orders anywhere they’ve lived or worked. Still, many of the chiefs Wynn talks to remain skeptical of his proposals, he said: “They say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t happen here. We’ve never had that problem.’”

The first time Tingle tried to get help was on September 9, 2014. Driving home from a dinner date, the couple had started arguing in the car. Their accounts of what happened next diverge radically. According to Martinez, Tingle hit herself and threatened to report him to the police. But in Tingle’s telling, Martinez grabbed her hair and struck her face into the dashboard and then the passenger window, causing a sharp stab of pain. She asked him to let her out, at first calmly and then frantically. He refused and started recording her on his phone, locking the doors. She screamed and banged on the window, waving at other cars for help. About the only thing they agree on is that he recorded her.

A driver of a nearby white Ford truck, Michael Gustin, noticed the commotion inside the car. He recalled watching in shock as a woman climbed out of the window at a stop light. Tingle ran over and asked Gustin if he could take her to the closest police station, he said—“in distress, like, in a panic.” He recalled that her face looked swollen and bruised and that she said her husband had hit her. Gustin drove her to the Seaford Police Department. When they arrived, he said, Martinez was already there.

Tingle ran into the station with her husband right behind her. Before she could do anything, she said, Martinez identified himself as a state trooper. According to the brief description in a domestic incident report, Tingle said Martinez had struck her head on the dashboard—behavior categorized as “offensive touching.” Martinez was allowed to leave.

One of the photographs taken by Tingle's friend, Jackie Marshall. COURTESY OF KAREN TINGLE

After the police brought Tingle home, her friend Jackie Marshall, who’d been babysitting, took a few photos. In one, a large bruise is visible on the side of Tingle’s face. “I told her that day that she was going to end up dead if she didn’t do something about it,” Marshall said.

Martinez was never arrested or charged. When asked why, a spokesperson for the Seaford Police Department said the case was referred to the state attorney general’s office, which has to approve or cooperate with the arrest of a police officer. However, Carl Kanefsky, a spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Justice, said there was no such requirement and that it was the Seaford Police Department which determined that criminal charges couldn’t be sustained.

About a week after the incident in the car, there was also a major development in Martinez's case with Loiselle. In a plea deal, prosecutors dropped dozens of charges, including the one for felony stalking. In exchange, Martinez pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally obtaining criminal history. “It was the judgment of experienced prosecutors, including those who prosecute domestic violence cases, that there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed on all of those counts,” said Kanefsky.

By this point, Tingle wanted to leave Martinez. She just didn’t know how. Most of all, she worried that if she broke up with him, he would take Kate away from her. So she simply tried to stay out of his way.  On November 6, the couple got into a fight in Tingle’s bedroom. Tingle said she picked up 10-month-old Kate and was walking away when Martinez grabbed a heavy lamp off the bedside table, pulling his arm back as though he was going to hit her. Instead, she said, he dropped the lamp and grabbed her by the throat. While she was still clutching Kate, he pushed her into the bathroom by the neck.

Tingle couldn’t breathe, she said: “I thought I was getting ready to die, and so was [Kate].” She recalled the bathroom sink digging into her back and the sound of Kate screaming while she tried not to drop her. Martinez’s face was right up in hers and she wet herself. “I have never seen a look in someone’s eyes that evil before in my life, and I hope I never see it again,” she said.

Somehow, she said, she managed to knee Martinez and make it back into their room. When Martinez shut himself inside the bathroom, she said, Tingle hastily placed Kate in the carrier and ran for the car. She had only driven five minutes down the road when Martinez called. ‘You forgot something,’” she recalled him saying and then it hit her: Fourteen year-old Kristen was still in the house.

So she went back. When she walked in the door, Martinez took her phone, keys and wallet, she said, and told her she wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t attempt to call the police. Martinez had told her once that if they tried to arrest him again, he wasn’t going, Tingle said, and she was afraid of what he meant by that. So she put Kate to sleep and told Kristen to stay in her room and keep the door closed. Then she got into bed next to Martinez.

The following day, Martinez had to leave the house to pick up Jasmine and Tingle acted as though she was going to work as usual, putting on her uniform and doing her hair. As soon as he drove away, she collected Kristen from school and went to the state police in Bridgeville. On the way, she texted Martinez and told him the relationship was over. He replied:

At the station, she told a detective what had happened. The probable cause affidavit notes that red marks were visible on her neck. As photos were taken for evidence, she was flooded with relief. She arrived home that evening just as Martinez was being led away by police—he had come to the house, despite her texts, to cook hot dogs with Jasmine. Martinez was charged with strangulation, second-degree unlawful imprisonment, menacing, endangering the welfare of a child and malicious interference with emergency communications. The police left Jasmine with Tingle. And that was how Tingle and Loiselle met late that night—when Tingle brought Loiselle her sleepy daughter. By then, Tingle’s head was aching and she was too exhausted to really talk.

But the two women spoke in the coming days. Loiselle would only call Tingle from a restricted number at first, because she was worried that Tingle might go back to Martinez. Slowly, though, they peeled back the layers of their stories. Tingle dug up her online dating emails from Martinez going back to 2011, when Loiselle had just moved in with him, and they discovered the extent of his deception. Loiselle had known for a while that Martinez had a new wife and another baby—but she had no idea that he’d been entangled with Tingle for nearly the whole time she’d known him. Tingle, for her part, was taken aback to find Loiselle so friendly and big-hearted—nothing like the unhinged woman Martinez had described. For the first time, both women realized, they had found someone who believed their story, every word.  

Andrel Martinez discussed his case for around half an hour on the phone earlier this year. He didn’t seem remotely defensive or guarded; in fact, he could be funny, even charming. Occasionally, he punctuated his narrative with a rueful chuckle, as if to say: Can you believe this? His story, he observed, had become like “something out of a Tom Clancy novel.”   

He’d lost his job in March 2015, after his DELJIS credentials were revoked. That June, he also accepted a plea deal in the strangulation case. In 45 states, including Delaware, strangulation is classified as a felony. It is one of the most reliable predictors of a future homicide in domestic violence cases—but it is also notoriously hard to prosecute and often reduced to a lower charge in a plea bargain. Martinez pleaded no contest to assault in the third degree, a violent misdemeanor. The judge suspended the one-year prison sentence for a year of probation on the condition that Martinez had no contact with Tingle or her children.

On the phone, Martinez had a ready explanation for just about everything. Loiselle, he explained, was a “controlling” girlfriend. She had started making allegations because he had sought equal custody of Jasmine, he said, describing one of the protective orders she’d sought as “frivolous” and “false.” As for Tingle, Martinez said she’d invented accusations of violence. “She hit herself and then said, ‘I’m going to tell the police you did it,’” he said, letting out a high-pitched laugh.” He referenced cellphone recordings of Tingle that he said supported his version of events but had been withheld by the state in legal proceedings. (His previous attorney has also said in court that Martinez has “multiple recordings” of Loiselle that disprove her stalking claims.) On several points, Martinez’s accusations mirrored those of both women. In a written document from one proceeding, Martinez accused Loiselle of berating him, threatening him, forcibly taking their daughter from him, driving by his residence and questioning his friends. He, too, expressed disappointment in the authorities’ response. “I was a good cop,” he said. “[I] tried to understand both sides of the story before I acted, and I felt like that was never given to me.”

Martinez after his arrest. DSP

Over and over, Martinez emphasized his devotion as a dad. In court documents, he admits to using DELJIS “in an effort to check into the safety and welfare of [my] daughter.” He elaborated on his thinking on the phone. “I’m going through a custody dispute where I was threatened. The cop instinct came out in me to be vigilant upon myself, to be vigilant upon my kids,” he explained. “[But] I never used anything from [DELJIS] other than peace of mind and perhaps knowing, ‘Hey, I can put that face with a name now if I’m approached in public.’” The whole experience had taught him a huge lesson, he said: He had picked the wrong women. “You don't let the devil into your house that easily,” he said. Near the end of the call, he stated, “I don't feel I was the aggressor in any sense of the entire situation.” (Some time afterward, he tried to take our conversation off the record.)

We went to extensive lengths to investigate Martinez’s claims. Martinez wouldn’t share the recordings he mentioned. Kanefsky, the Delaware justice department spokesman, said prosecutors “were not provided nor did they ever hear any such recording.” The state police declined to comment on extensive questions and are not required to release internal investigative files. Martinez said he couldn’t provide more information because he is still involved in legal proceedings: In a suit against the state police, he claims he was subjected to harsher punishment because he is Hispanic, alleging that people involved in the DELJIS investigation and others had made racist comments. (The Delaware State Police rejected these claims in a court filing.) His attorney responded to a detailed list of questions by saying simply: “Mr. Martinez disputes the accuracy of all statements made by your sources.”

We also contacted Martinez’s family and a number of his friends. Gordon Smith is a local father’s rights activist who made headlines several years ago after his ex-wife was arrested for fabricating domestic violence allegations (she eventually pleaded guilty to falsely reporting an incident.) He recalled that Martinez had reached out to him around the time of his first arrest. Smith was sympathetic: Domestic violence was real, he explained, but it had become a “cottage industry” in Delaware, where it could be used to “get an upper hand in a divorce custody battle.” Smith admitted he was “definitely surprised” when he learned that more than one woman had accused Martinez of abuse. Still, he felt his friend was treated unfairly at the DELJIS hearing, which he attended. “Having the two individuals [Loiselle and Tingle] sitting there, in my opinion, prejudiced the whole thing,” Smith said. (Martinez’s mother spoke in his defense at the hearing but declined to comment for this story.)

“What about some police courtesy?” Martinez asked. “Aren’t I still a police officer?”

Loiselle and Tingle’s stories have remained consistent—in months of interviews with us, in pages of court documents, in police reports when the incidents occurred. We also discovered additional instances where Martinez’s behavior was called into question. In July 2015, his parole officer observed that Martinez was “covertly recording” a home visit. The next week, he was caught attempting to smuggle an Olympus digital voice recorder into the probation office in his waistband. (It was recording at the time, according to a court document.) Another incident occurred at the visitation center where Loiselle and Martinez were supposed to exchange their daughter, using separate entrances and under staff supervision. Martinez was about to return Jasmine to Loiselle when he said he was going to take her to the emergency room instead because she had a diaper rash. The trooper who had escorted Loiselle to the center had known Martinez for more than 10 years. He advised him he would be arrested for violating a court order if he left with Jasmine. “What about some police courtesy?” Martinez asked him, according to the trooper’s report. “Aren’t I still a police officer?” The trooper reminded him he’d been suspended.

Both women were disappointed with the outcome of the various cases, but prosecutors did appear to pursue the charges against Martinez aggressively. DELJIS, too, moved quickly after Lewis reported her concerns. Peggy Bell, the organization’s executive director, declined to comment on specifics, but emphasized it was rare for officers to lose database access: Only one or two a year have their credentials permanently revoked. (Bell herself said she won’t even look up an address to send an officer a bereavement card.)

We also spoke to one officer who was familiar with Martinez’s case. He was not authorized to talk on the record, so he met for lunch, arriving in uniform at a restaurant. He said he had become “very concerned why this guy wasn’t being dealt with a little more forcefully by the state police.” It seemed to him that Martinez was “manipulating the system” and that the police “doubted the victims and made him a victim.”

The officer was clearly troubled—not just by this case but by its implications. Law enforcement needed to be more aware of the effects of emotional abuse, not just physical harm, he observed. He talked about how police possess a unique authority and trust that could be wielded against a victim in destructive ways. “They call domestic violence [and] rape a crime of power,” he said. But “the ultimate power” was the ability to arrest someone. “And the way the state police are viewed in this state?” he added. “We’re viewed very well.”

After he left, the waitress remarked that at the restaurant, they loved their police officers.

Earlier this year, Karen Tingle was living in an isolated village on a mountain, a long way from her former home. After Martinez accepted the plea deal in the summer of 2015, Tingle kept noticing strange things. She found tracks through the corn field next to her home. She was followed by a vehicle she didn’t recognize. After writing a panicked email to her state representative, Tingle was granted a meeting with the Delaware attorney general, Matt Denn, who ordered Martinez to be fitted with an ankle bracelet as an additional condition of his probation and approved funding for a security system in Tingle’s home.

But the strange things didn’t stop. In September of that year, Tingle showed up at the Bridgeville police barracks. Her “face was red, eyes watery and blood shot [sic] and she had tears coming from her eyes,” Corporal M. Sammons wrote in an affidavit. He described watching Tingle hand another officer “a red card with a message to a wife from Hallmark. Inside the card it was signed 'CUNT' and also had a picture of a child with a message written on it: 'DEAD MISTAKE.'” The child in the photo was Kate.

Sammons requested the GPS data from Martinez’s ankle bracelet, which showed he hadn’t been to Tingle’s house. This, Sammons wrote, “does not prove he did not have someone deliver [the card] on his behalf.” A few months later, a grand jury indicted Martinez for felony stalking. The charge, which requires proof of at least three incidents, was eventually dropped: Kanefsky, the Delaware justice department spokesman, cited the evidence that Martinez “was not in locations requisite to prove the stalking charge.” He also noted that “the evidence was not necessarily at odds with the victim’s version of events.” To Martinez, this episode was just another example of how the system had failed him. “I went 14 months with a GPS on my leg facing felony charges, and it seemed like she was just going every month to the police station,” he said. “All kinds of shit...and then the state dismissed the case. Crazy.”  As for Tingle, the state relocated her in late 2016 under a confidential program it uses in limited cases for witnesses or victims who need protection.

Tingle left her home in Delaware after a number of unsettling incidents. MELISSA JELTSEN

When we visited her, a thick blanket of snow covered the ground and the roads were slippery with black ice. We talked in the spacious living room of her furnished house. It was awkward sitting on other people’s furniture, Tingle remarked from a voluminous blue sectional. Her boyfriend, whom we’ll call Ryan, brought her a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. Tingle and Ryan started dating in 2015, some months after she had split with Martinez. Tingle found him kind and strikingly non-judgmental. He’d quickly adopted the role of protector—triple checking that doors were locked, monitoring the vehicles parked outside—and when Tingle moved, he came with her. As we talked, Tingle shifted uneasily on the couch: She was heavily pregnant and it was hard to get comfortable. Kate, now 3, bounced around the living room, giddy to have a guest. They didn’t have many visitors, Tingle explained, because they were trying to keep their location secret. She wouldn’t register her car or most of her bills to her new address. All it would take, Ryan explained, was a court filing accidentally made public, a tag on a social media post, and Martinez could find them.

Tingle has moved again since our visit. She looks after her baby. She waits tables, which seems a long way from the EMT career that once gave her such pride. “I never understood why women stayed after I took them to the hospital beaten to a pulp,” she wrote in a text message. “Now I understand. All those women I thought were stupid, now it’s me.” When she talks about that terrifying final night with Martinez, her voice, already deceptively girlish, is barely audible.

One of her few comforts is her friendship with Sarah Loiselle, who had been placed temporarily in the confidential protection program in 2014 and relocated. She, too, has since moved again. Loiselle doesn’t really like to talk about the precautions she takes to keep her location secret, although she has enrolled Jasmine in a federal program that would alert her if Martinez ever tried to get their daughter a passport.  

Sarah Loiselle and Karen Tingle. COURTESY OF KAREN TINGLE

Their friendship is an unlikely one. Tingle is one year older, but she views Loiselle as a kind of big sister. To her, Loiselle is elegant and well-dressed while she was raised on a farm and looks it. Loiselle admits that she is more direct and outspoken. “I’m not that type of person,” Tingle said, adding quietly: “Maybe I don’t stand up for myself.” She solicits Loiselle’s advice on everything—how much baby aspirin to give a teething child, how to deal with lawyers. (After we started reporting this story, Martinez moved to seek joint custody of both Jasmine and Kate.)  

For the past two years, Tingle, Loiselle and their daughters have all met up to celebrate Jasmine’s birthday. On one visit, after a full day of celebration and cake, the women sat outside as the night closed in and Tingle felt safe and happy. She considered moving somewhere near Loiselle so their improbable family could be together more often. Loiselle argued against it. She wanted Tingle and her daughters to be closer, too. But she thought it was far too risky for all of them to live in the same place, just like “sitting ducks.” And so the women went back to their new lives and kept on trading little jokes and updates on their jobs and kids and ups and downs—pretty much anything but Martinez. On a recent day, Tingle opened a Snapchat message from Loiselle. “Wish you were here,” it read, over a photo of an empty beach.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

1

The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.

That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

Even though Amy Goldberg has been treating gun patients for 30 years, the sense of horror has never completely gone away. On the cover: A bullet she keeps in her office. She pulled it out of a patient's heart during her residency.

She is the chair of Temple’s Department of Surgery, one of only 16 women in America to hold that position at a hospital. In my initial conversation with her, which took place shortly after the mass shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a man who walked into a gay nightclub with a semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun, she was joined by Scott Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator and Goldberg’s longtime friend. Goldberg has a southeastern Pennsylvania accent that at low volume makes her sound like a sweet South Philly grandmother and at higher volume becomes a razor. I asked her what changes in gun violence she had seen in her 30 years. She said not many. When she first arrived at Temple in 1987 to start her residency, “It was so obvious to me then that there was something so wrong.” Since then, the types of firearms have evolved. The surgeons used to see .22-caliber bullets from little handguns, Saturday night specials, whereas now they see .40-caliber and 9 mm bullets. Charles said they get the occasional victim of a long gun, such as an AR-15 or an AK-47, “but what’s remarkable is how common handguns are.”

Goldberg jumped in. “As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” Her voice rose. She said people have to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. “The country won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”

She dropped back into a softer register. “Nobody gives two shits about the black people in North Philadelphia if nobody gives two craps about the white kids in Sandy Hook. … I thought white little kids getting shot would make people care. Nope. They didn’t care. Anderson Cooper was up there. They set up shop. And then the public outrage fades.”

Goldberg apologized and said she wasn’t trying to stop me from writing a story. She just didn’t expect it to change anything.

2

The hospital’s main building is a nine-story tower on North Broad, the street that traces a north-south line through Philadelphia. If you think of Broad as the city’s spinal column, the hospital is about level with the heart. Stand on the sidewalk outside the hospital and look south on a clear day and you can see the pale marble and granite of City Hall, about 4 miles away, near Philly’s pelvis.

You can go to Temple for high-end elective surgery, like getting a knee replacement or a heart transplant, same as at any other major teaching hospital in the country. As Jeremy Walter, Temple Hospital’s amiable director of media relations, reminded me more than once, “Temple isn’t just a hospital that treats drug addicts and gun victims.” Still, it was founded 125 years ago by a Samaritan to provide free care, and that public-service mission persists. Some of the most violent blocks in the city are within a 4-mile radius of the hospital, and crime victims funnel in.

I first met Goldberg one weekday last summer, in the hospital lobby. I had arranged to stay and observe for 24 hours, accompanied every moment by Walter, who carried a trauma pager and a yellow folder of consent forms. The rule was that I could observe a surgery if the patient or a family member consented, and if I wanted to do an interview, the patient had to sign a form. Goldberg is 5 feet 2 inches tall, with a runner’s build. She wore a gray mock-turtleneck sweater with no sleeves. Her hair is short and there was a little gel in it that made it spiky. She explained that there are two main categories of trauma: blunt and penetrating. Blunt trauma is like a beating, a fall. Penetrating is a gun or stab wound. “Unfortunately we get a lot of penetrating traumas,” she said. Temple sees 2,500 to 3,000 traumas per year, around 450 of which were gunshot wounds in 2016.

The trauma pager buzzed shortly after noon. LEVEL 1 PED, it said—a pedestrian struck by a car. I followed Goldberg to the ER, and she disappeared behind a windowless set of double doors, into the trauma resuscitation area. A few moments later she emerged and waved me inside.

The trauma unit at Temple University Hospital, in a rare moment of calm.

The trauma area is a rectangular room with three bays, each of which can accommodate two patients side by side when it’s busy. It’s an organized place—there are small trays on wheels for different surgical procedures, each tray holding a particular complement of instruments—but the tubes and cables snaking from poles and machines make it feel a bit chaotic to the untrained eye. The goal of a trauma surgeon is to limit the amount of time that a patient spends in a trauma bay, to stabilize the patient until he can be transferred for a CT scan or to the OR for surgery. The temperature in the room feels about five degrees hotter than in the rest of the hospital. The air doesn’t seem to move.

The pedestrian was awake but silent. This concerned Goldberg because by all rights he should have been screaming in pain. He looked to be in his late 20s. He had black hair and his shirt had been removed. He spoke Spanish. There was a laceration above his right eye and a small amount of blood on the sheets near his head. Goldberg and about 20 other doctors and nurses in blue scrubs clustered around him, checking vital signs, asking questions. Goldberg wore purple latex gloves. She tapped lightly on the patient’s left forearm with one hand. The arm was broken.

“No dolor?” she asked in Spanish. No pain? He shook his head. “Really?” she said. “No?”

Goldberg walked over to another doctor and said, “So are you troubled by the fact that he’s not screaming? He has an arm that’s so freaking broken and he’s not screaming.” She frowned. “I’m troubled by that.”

The patient’s vital signs appeared stable but Goldberg was worried about internal bleeding. A lack of pain could indicate a hidden injury. He needed a CT scan.

Staff wheeled the patient out of the trauma unit and into a nearby procedure room for the scan. Goldberg took off her latex gloves and threw them in a biohazard trash can. Two police officers had been observing from a distance with pens in hand and notepads open. One of the cops, a large man with a buzzcut, got Goldberg’s attention by saying, “Doc.”

“I’m Goldberg.”

The officer asked what the police should put down in their report for the patient’s condition. She said critical. This has been Goldberg’s policy for years, she explained to me as she exited the trauma bay and walked down a hallway toward the CT scanner. “I always make the patients critical until I know they’re fine. It’s a jinx thing.”

Goldberg is superstitious. On days when she’s on call, she shaves her legs. She can’t say why, she just started doing it years ago and now she will not deviate. She’s been wearing the same style of tan Timberlands for 15 years; her current pair, given to her by a colleague when she became chair of surgery, has the Temple logo inked on the heels. She parks her gray BMW in the same spot every time. “It’s so hard to take care of patients without making mistakes that you need every edge.” She recently hired a sports psychologist to talk to the residents about strategies for peak performance. Visualization. Positive self-talk. Breathing. For most of her career, she has stopped at the same Dunkin’ Donuts to order a large coffee with cream and two Sweet‘N Lows. A few years ago, the store stopped carrying Sweet‘N Low so she bought a box and left it there; they keep it under the counter for her. “It’s pink,” she told me once. “Sweet‘N Low is pink, Equal is blue, Splenda is yellow. And that is how you have to build a good system, believe it or not. So nobody makes a mistake.”

Goldberg, a superstitious sort, has been wearing Timberlands on the job for 15 years.

In the hallway next to the ER, she opened a door and I followed her into a small darkened room where six young doctors sat at computers. A window looked into the bay next door that held the CT scanner. “Billie Jean” played at low volume from a tinny speaker. Goldberg watched through the window as staff moved the patient from his gurney onto the bed of the machine. He cried out. Goldberg said, “That seems more appropriate.” Now they gave him some pain medicine. She looked at me and winced. “He has a broken humerus. I mean, you can feel it.” She streaked the thumb of her right hand against her fingers. “It’s one of my least favorite injuries. You can feel the bones rubbing together.” The CT scan showed some clotted blood in the patient’s head, appearing on the screen as patches of white. Goldberg ordered some additional scans.

When a shooting comes across the trauma pager, the code is GSW. There were no GSWs that night, only assaults. One patient was an older man who had been beaten up and complained of stomach pain. Another had been stabbed in the abdomen during a fight. His assailant was brought in too, in handcuffs, a white-haired man in a red T-shirt, his left eye bloodied and swollen shut.

The injuries weren’t life-threatening. Goldberg attended to the patients in the trauma unit. When she wasn’t there, she went on rounds, taking the elevator up to the eighth and ninth floors to check in with patients recovering from earlier traumas. She walked fast from one place to the other and I would lose her sometimes behind corners and doors and she’d have to double back for me. These are busy shifts even when there aren’t a lot of fresh traumas coming in. During a down moment Goldberg mentioned that she was thinking about scaling back her call schedule now that she’s chair of surgery, with large administrative and educational responsibilities. “I’ve been doing this 30 years,” she said. “Do I need to be on call? Do I need to do Saturdays?”

The pager stayed quiet overnight and through late morning, when Goldberg’s call shift ended. I arranged to return and shadow her again on her next shift, in two days. I left the hospital before lunch. The following morning the trauma pager blew up. LEVEL 1 GSW TO CHEST. LEVEL 1 MULTIPLE GSW TRANSFER FROM EPISC (Episcopal Hospital). LEVEL 1 SECOND GSW MALE.

3

Goldberg didn’t know much about guns or gun violence until she got to Temple. She grew up in the quiet Philadelphia suburb of Broomall. Her father owned a dairy business in the city, her mother was a schoolteacher. She was an intense kid who really believed the religious ideas she was learning at Jewish summer camp “in a big, bad way.” When she was 11, she woke up to see a light through her window and feel a tremor underfoot, and she wondered if it was God’s doing.

She went on to study psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She particularly loved anatomy. “It’s a miracle,” she told me. “The creation of a person, you know. It’s the heart beating and the lungs bringing air. It is so miraculous.” Surgery, for Goldberg, was a way of honoring the miracle. And trauma surgery was the ultimate form of appreciation, because a surgeon in trauma experienced so much variety. She might be operating on the carotid artery in the neck, or the heart in the chest, or the large bowel or small bowel in the abdomen, or the femoral artery in the thigh, at any given moment, on any given night.

In her first or second year of residency at Temple, when she was in her mid-20s, she helped treat a young boy who had been shot in the chest by his sibling who picked up a loaded gun that was lying around. The doctors couldn’t save him. The senselessness made her so angry. Goldberg listened as a senior resident informed the boy’s mother. “I’m sorry,” the resident said, “he has passed.” The mother didn’t react; she didn’t seem to understand what she had just heard. Goldberg spoke up. “He died. We’re so sorry. He died.” It was a lesson: Be direct. “You have to find a very compassionate way of being honest,” she said.

“You think you know what happens here? Because I thought I knew. But there’s nothing that can prepare you.”

She finished her residency in 1992 and decided to stay at Temple, and the feeling of wrongness only intensified. There was a teenage boy in August 1992 who was shot in the heart. His heart stopped beating. Goldberg revived it. He lived. But some weeks later he came in again, with a shooting injury to his brachial artery, in the upper arm. He almost bled out, almost died again, but the surgeons got him back, again. “And then of course the third time he came in, he was shot through the head, and he was dead,” Goldberg said.

She started thinking that Temple should find a way to intervene—to try to talk to patients while they’re in the hospital so they would never need to come back. But she didn’t have the authority yet. She was just a trauma surgeon, a good one, and getting better. She had good hands and good judgment and a methodical approach to the craft. And as five years stretched into 10, and 10 into 20, Goldberg built up a deep well of experience in doing the things that are necessary to save the lives of gun victims, the things that are never shown on TV or in movies, the things that stay hidden behind hospital walls and allow Americans to imagine whatever they like about the effects of bullets or not to imagine anything at all. “You think you know what happens here?” Scott Charles asked me. “Because I thought I knew. But there’s nothing that can prepare you for what bullets do to human bodies. And that’s true for pro-gun people also.”

The main thing people get wrong when they imagine being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the problem. The lump of metal lodged in the body. The action-movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, and now he is better. This is not trauma surgery. Trauma surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone. The bullet can stay in the body just fine. But the bleeding has to be contained, even if the patient is awake and screaming because a tube has just been pushed into his chest cavity through a deep incision without the aid of general anesthesia (no time; the patient gets an injection of lidocaine). And if the heart has stopped, it must be restarted before the brain dies from a lack of oxygen.

It is not a gentle process. Some of the surgeon’s tools look like things you’d buy at Home Depot. In especially serious cases, 70 times at Temple last year, the surgeons will crack a chest right there in the trauma area. The technical name is a thoracotomy. A patient comes in unconscious, maybe in cardiac arrest, and Goldberg has to get into the cavity to see what is going on. With a scalpel, she makes an incision below the nipple and cuts 6 to 10 inches down the torso, through skin, through the layer of fatty tissue, through the muscles. Into the opening she inserts a rib-spreader, a large metal instrument with a hand crank. It pulls open the ribs and locks them into place so the surgeons can reach the inner organs. Every so often, she may also have to break the patient’s sternum—a bilateral thoracotomy. This is done with a tool called a Lebsche knife. It’s a metal rod with a sharp blade on one end that hooks under the breastbone. Goldberg takes a silver hammer. It looks like—a hammer. She hits the top of the Lebsche knife with the hammer until it cuts through the sternum. “You never forget that sound,” one of the Temple nurses told me. “It’s like a tink, tink, tink. And it sounds like metal, but you know it’s bone. You know like when you see on television, when people are working on the railroad, hammering the ties?”

“It’s just the worst,” Charles told me. “They’re breaking bone. And everybody—every body—has its own kind of quality. And sometimes there’s a big guy you’ll hear, and it’s the echo—the sound that comes out of the room. There’s some times when it doesn’t affect me, and there are some times when it makes my knees shake, when I know what’s going on in there.”

Some of the simple tools surgeons employ in the trauma bay, including the Lebsche knife and silver hammer used to break the sternum while opening chest cavities.

Now the chest is open, and Goldberg can work. If the heart has stopped, she can try to get it beating again. This may involve open cardiac massage—literally holding the heart in her hands and massaging it to get blood flowing up to the brain again. If there’s bleeding in the cavity, she can control it by putting a metal clamp on the heart or on the lung. She can also clamp the aorta, the largest artery in the body, so that instead of the blood going down into the bowels, where it’s needed less, the blood goes up to the brain.

“These crossing bullets are just so challenging,” she said. “Where is the injury? Is it in the chest? Is it in the abdomen? You’re down there, looking, and sometimes you find it, and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes it just really hurts as you work your way through.” She meant that it hurts when patients suffer. Hurts them and hurts her.

There are some gun victims who die quickly, right there in the trauma bay, or soon after being transferred up to the OR. Others develop cascades of life-threatening complications in the following days that surgeons race to manage.

Goldberg said she saw a movie a few years ago that captures what it’s like to operate under these conditions. It was a documentary about the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground for months in 2010. “They interviewed them all. And the miner that had the hardest time down there was the youngest guy. Not the oldest guy. It was the youngest guy. And they said, why? Why did you have such a hard time? And he said, God and the Devil were with me.” Goldberg thought that was perfect. “That’s what I had been searching for, for years, in how you feel in the operating room. God and the Devil are with you. You start a case. A young person. Shot. They come in talking. You go upstairs. They have this devastating injury. The Devil. You suck. You’re gonna kill this guy. You call yourself a good trauma surgeon. You’re the worst. And you just plow ahead and plow ahead and plow ahead. You find what’s injured. You control it. God. Oh, you are the best. You’ve done a great job. Then you’re working. You find another injury you didn’t expect. You suck, you suck, you suck.”

During trauma surgery, tissue in the lower extremities can die, causing gangrene, in which case surgeons might have to amputate the leg at higher and higher points, first at the shin, then at the knee, then at the thigh.

It’s possible for a surgeon to get distracted by the wrong wound. The most dangerous wounds don’t always look the worst. People can get shot in the head and they’re leaking bits of brain from a hole in the skull and that’s not the fatal wound; the fatal wound is from another bullet that ripped through the chest. One patient a few years ago was shot in the face with a shotgun at close range over some money owed. He pulled his coat up over his mangled face and walked to the ER of one of Temple’s sister hospitals, approaching a nurse. She looked at him. He lowered the coat. The nurse thought to herself what you might expect a person to think in such a situation: “Daaaaaamn.” He was stabilized, then transferred to Temple. He lived.

The price of survival is often lasting disability. Some patients, often young guys, wind up carrying around colostomy bags for the rest of their lives because they can’t poop normally anymore. They poop through a “stoma,” a hole in the abdomen. “They’re so angry,” Goldberg said. “They should be angry.” Some are paralyzed by bullets that sever the spinal column. Some lose limbs entirely. During trauma surgery, when the blood flow is redirected to the brain and heart by an aortic clamp, blood goes away from other areas, and tissue in the lower extremities can die, causing gangrene, in which case surgeons must amputate the leg at higher and higher points, first at the shin, then at the knee, then at the thigh, to stay ahead of the necrotic tissue as it spreads. The femur bone may have to be disarticulated—removed entirely from the socket, and discarded. There was a woman several years ago whose boyfriend shot her in the leg. The bullet clipped the femoral artery and she bled. Goldberg was on call that day. She had to amputate the woman’s legs to save her life. “I’m so haunted by that,” she said.

Eighty percent of people who are shot in Philadelphia survive their injuries. This statistic surprises people when they hear it. They tend to think that when people get shot in the belly or the chest or the face, they die. But the reality is that people get shot and then they are going to survive, because trauma surgeons are going to save them, and that’s when the real suffering begins.

4

Rafi Colon was shot once in the abdomen with a 9 mm handgun during a home invasion in September 2005. The bullet tore through his intestines. Trauma surgeons at Temple had to open his abdomen to repair the injuries, but fistulas developed, holes that wouldn’t heal, and until they healed, the incision couldn’t be closed. He spent the next 11 months in the hospital, immobilized in bed, with an open wound down the front of him that had the circumference of a basketball. It got to the point where it was a normal thing for him to look down and think, oh, those are my intestines, there they are.

“It became second nature,” he told me recently over lunch at a Panera Bread in the Philly suburbs. “It wasn’t like a gruesome thing.” The holes in his intestines leaked stomach acid and burned away the surrounding tissues and skin, leaving less skin available to eventually stretch over the wound and close it. Colon learned to sop up the excess acid from his exposed intestines with gauze pads and later with a machine that sucked the acid through a tube. When his friends came to visit, they had a hard time looking at him. He messed with them once by asking a buddy to get him a Rita’s water ice, Philadelphia’s version of a snow cone. He knew what would happen when he ate it. The water ice was red, the Swedish Fish flavor from that summer, and 30 seconds after he swallowed it, the red water ice came oozing out of the hole in his intestine. His friends bolted.

Over the course of his long recovery, from the fall of 2005 into the spring and summer of 2006, Colon got a feel for the rhythms of the Trauma Service. Lying there in the bed, he occupied himself by counting the number of times each day that trauma codes were announced over the PA system. It seemed like the busiest times were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. He’d ask the doctors, how many yesterday, was it 17? “They’d say, ‘No, 18.’” He could tell when the residents were stressed out by how many Diet Cokes they drank. There were days when the doctors were so busy with fresh traumas that they didn’t make rounds until 7 or 8 at night. “They would say, ‘Yeah, it was a busy day.’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I heard.’”

Rafi Colon in his stairwell at home. Though his neck and stomach scars are still visible years after being shot, he can't terrify friends with his water ice trick anymore.

It ultimately took 14 surgeries to repair the damage done by one bullet. Temple’s surgeons stretched his abdominal wall closed with the help of some muscle from another part of his body and an artificial mesh. If you see Colon today, the only way you can tell he was wounded is that he walks with a minor tilt; he calls it “my Keyser Söze limp.”

Goldberg was part of the team of doctors who cared for him. They talked about muscle cars and sports. (She liked the Eagles; his team was the Giants.) He remembers that she was the doctor who would notice when he was feeling despair and let him eat a little something that the nurses wouldn’t necessarily allow, like a small chip of ice, or sometimes a piece of candy. He couldn’t eat normally—he was being fed intravenously—but “the fact that I could get a piece of ice, it was like heaven.”

She has gotten more sensitive over the years, she said. When you’re a young trauma surgeon, you’re developing skills, like how to put a bowel back together. Her medical training was all about learning to operate, to recognize the kinds of patterns that she now teaches to students and young doctors. I once saw her give a lecture to 11 medical students who had just completed their surgical rotation. Goldberg diagrammed anatomy and formulae on a whiteboard and asked questions about how the students would diagnose various hypothetical patients. But she also asked the students to share their experiences with patients and their feelings about those cases. One student spoke about stitching together the chest of a young shooting victim who had died after surgeons attempted to resuscitate him in the trauma area; the student’s first thought was that he was excited to practice stitching a chest, then he felt guilty for being excited. Another student recalled being surprised when a patient asked for his business card even though he was just a lowly medical student. “Yeah,” Goldberg said. “He trusted you.”

Often when Goldberg meets a shooting victim, it turns out she once treated a sibling, parent, cousin or friend. “I’m a family doctor, a little bit, because I’ve been here so long,” she said. One day at the hospital, I saw her go on rounds, meeting with patients in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) on the ninth floor. A sign on a bulletin board said WELCOME TO SICU! YOUR HEALING STARTS HERE! The letters were surrounded by gold stars.

Talking to patients seemed to energize Goldberg. She was alternately lighthearted and serious. The patients were uniformly docile and tired. They were on pain medication that slowed their speech. The first patient, shot in the neck, was a young man accompanied by his girlfriend, who sat next to him on the bed with an expression of concern. “When I was shot, I fell on my face,” he said. The second patient was older. A tube to drain fluids was snaking out of his chest. He held out a trembling left hand and smiled. “A little bit of the shakes,” he said. Goldberg told the man he was scheduled to be released the following Monday. He had been caught in some kind of crossfire. “We will miss you,” Goldberg said, “but there comes a day.”

“Cut the umbilical cord, huh?” he said, and laughed softly.

Goldberg descended to the eighth floor to meet with another gun victim. She knocked on his door and said hello in her friendly voice. There were two large men inside the room in T-shirts and shorts. She assumed they were his family, but when she entered, the men rushed over to her and said that the patient was a suspected shooter himself. They were plainclothes cops, guarding him.

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “It’s better if I don’t know.”

She went over to the side of the patient’s bed as the cops watched and said she was Dr. Goldberg and she wanted to explain what was happening and help him if he needed anything.

He looked young. He seemed afraid. There was an open wound in his chest, a vertical incision from below his nipples to his belly button, rising and falling with his breath. Surgeons had needed to remove one of his kidneys, his spleen and part of his stomach to repair the damage of the bullet and save his life. After the surgery the tissue swelled, which happens sometimes, and they couldn’t immediately stitch the incision closed, so they had to leave it open. The edges of the wound were pink and raw.

Goldberg reached out and held his left hand in her hand while telling him what organs he’d lost.

“You don’t need your spleen. You do need your kidney,” she said. “But luckily, God gave us two.”

He nodded slightly. She asked how he was feeling. All he said was, “Pain.”

Goldberg said they would try to help with that and rubbed her fingers across his hand in a gesture of tenderness.

Gunshot victim Lamont Randell, shot twice during a robbery, begins his long recovery process.

5

The key distinction for Goldberg isn’t innocent or guilty, it’s rational or irrational. Gun violence is irrational, there’s no pattern to it. Police statistics show that shootings decrease in the cold winter months and pick up when the weather warms, but any given trauma shift in the winter can be busy and any shift in the summer perfectly quiet.

Goldberg has always found the senselessness of violence frustrating, and when she was promoted to chief of trauma 15 years ago, she started thinking about how to engineer some control, to help patients “above and beyond just being a trauma surgeon.” She imagined a comprehensive approach to prevent shootings and keep patients from showing up in a trauma bay in the first place. She knew this would involve talking to people in the community, but she also knew she was a flawed messenger. “Who’s going to listen to this white Jewish girl say that guns in the inner city aren’t good for you? Nobody’s going to listen to me say that. I wouldn’t listen to me.” She went looking for help, and found Scott Charles.

A big, energetic guy with glasses and a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Charles has been working to reduce youth violence since 1988. When he was growing up in Sacramento, two of his older brothers were shot and his sister committed suicide with a gun, and at 19 one of his best friends was shot and killed. He moved to Philadelphia when his sociologist wife got hired by Penn, and two years later, he joined a nonprofit that designed service-learning projects in public schools. Some of his students from North Philly started collecting the stories of families who had lost children to gun violence, which is how Charles made the connection to Goldberg—Temple had treated one of the victims, Lamont Adams, a 16-year-old from North Philly who was shot and killed in 2004 after a false rumor was allegedly spread about him.

Goldberg hosted a tour for Charles and his students, inviting them into the trauma unit and explaining what gun patients experience there. She was immediately impressed by the way he dealt with the kids. She told him she’d create a new outreach position for him at Temple, that she’d get up “in people’s faces” until she made sure it happened.

“She said, ‘Don’t go anywhere else,’” Charles recalled. “‘I’m going to write you a check for one year of your salary. If I don’t get this position for you, you can cash the check, it’s yours, and take another job.’ And I was like—this white lady’s crazy. My wife was like, who’s this lady who keeps calling you at 11 o’clock at night? ‘It’s this crazy doctor.’”

Charles accepted, joining Temple in August 2005, and since then he and Goldberg have developed a suite of ambitious programs in collaboration with other Temple doctors and staff. “The thing that allows us to do so much of this is she carries a big stick,” Charles said. “Who was going to get in her way?”

There are three programs aimed at preventing violence before it happens. Cradle to Grave is an expansion of that first tour Charles took at Temple. He brings groups of kids and adults into the trauma area and shows them how surgeons save gun patients. He has his own copies of the various surgical instruments for demonstration purposes, removing them from a travel bag: chest tube, rib-spreader, hammer, Lebsche knife. He introduces the visitors to Goldberg if she’s available. He tells the story of Lamont Adams, asking a volunteer to pretend to be Lamont and then placing a circular red sticker on the location of each of Lamont’s 24 bullet wounds (entry and exit). On his chest. His abdomen. His thigh and arms. And most disturbing of all, the two bullet wounds on his hand, a sign that Lamont was trying to shield his face from the bullets at close range.

Charles also runs the Fighting Chance program, a series of training sessions for community members, where doctors show people in neighborhoods how to give first aid to gunshot victims, to apply tourniquets and stop blood loss in the seconds immediately following a shooting, before the EMTs or police arrive. Recently, Charles has also become a sort of Johnny Appleseed of gun locks, handing them out to parents who want to keep their children from getting hurt in accidents. He keeps boxes of them at the hospital and distributes the locks with no questions asked. Sometimes he lugs them to subway stations and offers them to commuters.

When Goldberg first saw Scott Charles talk to a group of children, she knew she needed him on her team.

That’s prevention. Temple has also created an intervention component, called Turning Point, where shooting victims get extra counseling while they’re still in the hospital. “They come in, they’re very scared,” Goldberg said. “‘Am I gonna die? Where’s my Mom?’ Then, as soon as they would recover, they would not be so scared anymore, which maybe wasn’t good.” So if a victim is between 18 and 30 years old, he’s offered a series of supports in addition to the usual visits with Charles and a social worker. Temple asks the patients if they want to talk to a trauma survivor. And they are given an opportunity to view a video of their own trauma-bay resuscitation. (The surgeries in the trauma area are videotaped for quality control.) About half say yes. Charles shows them the video. They get psychological counseling for any PTSD symptoms, as well as case management services to help them get high-school diplomas or jobs.

Turning Point was initially controversial within the hospital. Some doctors thought it was cruel to show patients videos of their own surgeries, especially patients who had done nothing wrong. But Goldberg argued that she wasn’t judging anyone’s past or even asking about it. “The only way I know how to deal with a problem is, let’s break it down. Let’s try to educate,” she said.

Breaking it down has involved doing science. Goldberg and her team have needed to gather data about questions that have never been rigorously answered, a common situation when it comes to gun violence. For instance, when a paramedic first finds a gun or stabbing victim, nobody knows if it’s better to administer IV fluids and put a tube down the victim’s throat on the spot, or if the medic should simply race the victim to the hospital. Trauma surgeons have long suspected that the latter option is preferable—most shooting victims actually arrive at Temple in the back of police cruisers, a practice the cops call “scoop and run”—but there has never been a long-term randomized study.

So Temple launched one. It’s called the Philadelphia Immediate Transport in Penetrating Trauma Trial (PIPT), an elaborate undertaking that has involved close coordination with emergency personnel and also dozens of community meetings where doctors explained how the study works (over the next five years, some victims of penetrating trauma will receive immediate transport and some won’t) and how people can opt out of the study (by wearing a special wristband). In that same spirit, Goldberg has been gathering data on the Turning Point program. For years, patients have been randomized into a control group and an experimental group. One group gets typical care and the other gets Turning Point, and then patients in both groups answer a questionnaire that quantifies attitudes toward violence.

In November the hospital published its first scientific results from Turning Point, based on 80 patients. According to Temple’s data, the Turning Point patients showed “a 50% reduction in aggressive response to shame, a 29% reduction in comfort with aggression, and a 19% reduction in overall proclivity toward violence.” Goldberg told me she was proud of the study, not only because it suggested that the program was effective, but also because it represented a rare victory over the status quo. Turning Point grew out of her experience with that one patient in 1992, the three-time shooting victim who died the third time. It took her that long to get the authority, to gather the data, to get it published, to shift the system a little bit.

Twenty-four years.

6

Each time I went to the hospital, I asked Goldberg what else was going on with her aside from work. She usually talked about running. She likes to run along the Schuylkill River while listening to music and thinking about nothing at all. She competes in a few half-marathons a year.

I never learned much about Goldberg’s personal life. She lives alone in an apartment in Center City. She has a rowing machine there and access to a treadmill in the building’s gym. Her religious faith is still strong—it’s not that she goes around talking about it, she told me, it’s just that she has worked for 30 years in trauma and seen a lot of death, and it’s hard to do that and not feel something about God. I noticed one day she was wearing a white Lokai bracelet, a ring of plastic capsules said to contain mud from the Dead Sea and water from Mount Everest. “The highs and the lows, to stay even-keeled,” she said. “I probably need 10 of them, five on each hand.”

The major non-running events in her life tend to be awards ceremonies. She has reached the point in her medical career where people gather and say nice things about her, and there are plates of olives and prosciutto. Her med-school alma mater, Mount Sinai in New York, recently invited her to give a special lecture at Grand Rounds, a hallowed medical tradition. On March 16 Temple threw a party for her “investiture,” a ceremony where she passed from being merely the chair of surgery to being the George S. Peters MD and Louise C. Peters Chair in Surgery. Endowed chairs at universities are a big deal. Past colleagues from all over the country came to speak about her qualities. One compared her to Teddy Roosevelt’s famous Man in the Arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood … who spends himself or herself in a worthy cause.” (“Herself” is not actually a part of Roosevelt’s quote, but the guy modernized it for Goldberg.) She gave a brief acceptance speech focusing on the importance of teamwork to medical excellence. She said she used to dream about being a sports coach, and now she’s coaching the next generation of surgeons. As she once put it to me, “One of us can’t give perfect care. But together, maybe, we can give perfect care.”

In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else.

One of the speakers at the investiture called Goldberg a “realistic idealist,” and when I saw her later, she said she’d been thinking about the phrase. At first it surprised her that people saw her that way, but she realized it captured something true. “When I get angry, and hurt,” she told me, “it’s because I can still be a little naïve.” Even after all this time, the sense of horror she first experienced as a resident treating gun patients has never completely gone away.

One evening when I was at the hospital, I saw what she meant. Two shooting victims came in, a man and a woman, about two hours apart, and were quickly patched up. The man was shot twice, in a wrist and a thigh—four holes, not life-threatening. The woman was shot once in the thigh with a small entry wound but no exit wound—a stray bullet that struck her while she was walking down the street. In the trauma bay, the surgeons taped a paper clip over the entry wound so they could identify that spot on the X-ray. Goldberg wheeled the monitor over to show me the X-ray image: paper clip and bullet. “Very small,” she said, pointing to the slug, “like a .22.” As so many other patients do, the patient asked the trauma surgeons if they were going to take the bullet out, and the surgeons explained that they fix what the bullet injures, they don’t fix the bullet.

They left the wound open to prevent infection and put a dressing on it. “We’ll probably send her home tonight,” Goldberg said. “Isn’t that awful?”

She meant it as a strictly human thing. There’s no medical reason for a patient to be in a hospital longer than necessary. The point was the ridiculousness of the situation. A woman gets shot through no fault of her own, she comes to the hospital scared, and if she’s OK, Goldberg says, “It’s like, here, take a little Band-Aid.” The woman goes home, and for everyone else in the city, it’s as though the shooting never happened. It changes no policy. It motivates no law. In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else.

Which is why she pours so much of herself into the outreach programs, the scientific studies and any other method she has of finding control and making the problem visible. Then, as always with Goldberg, there’s call. “We care,” she told me once. “We’re gonna be here. We’re gonna be here. We’re gonna be here, and then you know what, we’re still gonna be here. And then we’re still here. That kind of thing.”

The last time I saw Goldberg, I was eating breakfast in the hospital’s basement cafeteria, one corridor away from the morgue where bodies are kept, pending transport. It was at the end of a relatively quiet overnight call shift in late March. She walked in with a coffee, looking calm and fresh. The forecast showed rising temperatures. The crust of snow on the sidewalks would soon melt, the days would lengthen, people would leave their houses to enjoy the weather. Spring was coming, and the shootings would pick back up.

I grew up on the border between the United States and Mexico, near the boundary line that starts at the Pacific Ocean and weaves east toward the Gulf of Mexico. My parents, who are both from Tijuana, met in that city in the late 1970s while my father was home from California’s Central Valley, where he was a field worker. They decided to build a family across the border in San Diego, and that’s where I was born.

It was a time when such a relocation was less an international move and more a matter of switching neighborhoods. The border was one place. More than 100,000 of us crossed in either direction every day. My life was shaped by these comings and goings: During the week, we’d go to school and work in San Diego; on weekends and holidays we’d head south for a birthday or a wedding, or to have dinner with my grandmother Esperanza. She was a retired nurse who lived on the steep hillsides of Colonia Libertad, right alongside the boundary. From the front doorstep of my childhood home on Z Street, we had a view of San Diego Bay and its naval ships. We could also see Tijuana in the distance, its lights like multicolored stars at night.

Crossing the border was made possible by my privilege. On my family’s returns into San Diego, all we had to do was smile and declare “U.S.!” when a border agent asked our citizenship. We were brown-skinned Americans, and no other proof was needed. This was the 1980s, and others crossed just as easily with the shopping and tourist visas that were readily handed to Mexicans born in the region. Back then, there was nothing to fear on the border if there was nothing to hide.

But in 1994, just before I turned 14, this began to change. That October, the Clinton administration reinforced the border near San Diego with more fencing and more agents; the number of immigrants from Mexico was increasing due in part to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Then came September 11, 2001, and the resulting frenzy over border security and deporting criminal foreigners. I was in college by that time, and I resisted the notion of a tightening line, going back and forth as I always had. I’d picked up bar-hopping, and because there was nothing remotely as purifying as a long boozy night in downtown Tijuana, I ventured with friends or cousins to Plaza del Zapato, a city block full of techno and alternative clubs. We’d drink beer after beer while dancing to Depeche Mode and Maldita Vecindad. Sometimes I’d bump into Tijuana-side cousins doing the same, and our parties would merge.

And yet, crossing back, I couldn’t escape how the border was being militarized right under our noses. A few years later, we watched as a triple-layer fence went up around parts of San Diego; in 2006 we’d hear on the news about George W. Bush’s plan to extend the fence all the way through Texas. Agents now dressed in heavy vests, with earpieces and gloves. Tall floodlights shone into Mexico along the Tijuana River, sometimes illuminating groups of men huddling in concrete channels. IDs became mandatory for re-entry. The vehicle lines at the San Ysidro port grew exponentially, snaking into Tijuana’s side streets—sometimes into Colonia Libertad, in fact.

There were deeper costs. The fence influenced our daily plans. Cousins of mine in Tijuana trained themselves to wake up at 4 a.m. to accommodate the lengthening wait times at the border and arrive for the morning bell at their schools in San Ysidro or Chula Vista. It also imposed quiet but prolonged divisions in my family. Relatives who had made their lives in San Diego, raising American children, could not travel to Tijuana because they had not become U.S. citizens and might not be allowed re-entry. Others lost their U.S. visas—for, say, a run-in with the law as teenagers—and moved to Tijuana, unable to secure the paperwork to return to San Diego. The border became a knife, slicing through the region, changing how we related, how we thought about the future. We adapted by creating parallel events on each side—dual baby showers, dual birthdays, dual weddings—sometimes even on the same day. For the most part, this worked well. But for someone like me, who had been born in the U.S. and whose parents had become U.S. citizens, the wall remained an almost comical idea. How could any sort of fence cut through who we were?

For many of us, there was one place where these wounds could be salved. Friendship Park, located west of the San Ysidro entry port, is a plaza that surrounds Monument 258, the white obelisk that marks the western end of the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Also known as Friendship Circle, the park was inaugurated by first lady Pat Nixon in August 1971, back when the border was barely defined by a barbed-wire fence, and it was intended to serve as a symbol of binational fraternity. “May there never be a wall between these two great nations, only friendship,” Nixon declared at the park’s dedication. Even after the barbed wire was replaced by gigantic steel bars, the area remained a place of connection. For years, those who had loved ones stuck “on the other side,” north or south, could meet at the plaza, touch through the bars, and gossip or laugh or share news.

I did not visit Friendship Park myself until 2011, when I attended a 40th anniversary celebration of the plaza with my mother. The Department of Homeland Security, citing a need to make the fence even more secure, had closed the space in 2009, reopening it only for this one-day event. The park is where Southern California meets Baja California, so of course it is a beautiful place—the breeze sweeps onshore over the rocks, waves crash up against the fence that stretches into the sea. But perhaps I should have expected that Friendship Park would have lost its hospitable sheen by then. To reach the plaza, visitors had to ride in a shuttle for about a mile over a largely submerged mud lane. Once there, the triple fencing created a sort of no man’s land; at the boundary with Mexico, an imposing metal mesh—preventing all physical contact except for the skin of a fingertip—had been installed on the bars.

The U.S. Border Patrol had designated a sort of corralled-in space for us to see into Tijuana, and my mother and I stood there, with a handful of other families and some border activists. We listened to U.S. officials make a speech or two. The space was small and uncomfortable, and I felt as if we were cattle left out to bake in the heat. On the other side of the mesh, an entirely different scene was playing out. In Tijuana’s half of the park—an open, unmonitored stretch of beach—we could hear roaming musicians playing trombones and tamboras, smell shrimp being grilled in stalls along the boardwalk, and see people dancing—actually dancing—in the sun. Mexican officials had set up a tent and a podium, and a few city council members from Tijuana waved hello. My mother and I shared a glance.

And then we decided to make use of our privilege.

We got back in the car and headed south on Interstate 5 so we could join the party on the other side. After a quick curvy right over the Tijuana River, and then a drive along the fence in Mexico, we arrived at the Tijuana beach in about 25 minutes. We parked near the old bullring overlooking the shore, and approached the fence. On this side, the boundary was painted with bright murals, and marked with crosses bearing the names of people who had died trying to cross. We peered through the fence again. We could hear a few speakers but not much. The mesh made it hard to see. A couple of people on the U.S. side recognized us from minutes earlier and waved with half-hearted smiles. They looked trapped.

Later I would think about how easy it was for me to exercise both sides of my identity like this—and how my mother, who received citizenship in the Reagan administration amnesty of 1986, was able to return home that same night, to watch the Tijuana evening news from the comfort of her living room in San Diego. There are so many families for which this isn’t true. Maybe certain loved ones have crossed illegally or overstayed a visa, and now are forced to remain in place as they await citizenship papers. Maybe relatives in Mexico cannot visit because they have been denied a tourist visa or do not have the means to travel. Or maybe a family member has been deported, with no way to re-enter. These deportations have increased over the past decade, leading to the removal of about 3 million people. The number of parents who were deported between 2003 and 2013 but have children who are U.S. citizens falls somewhere between 740,000 and 925,000, according to a report from the Urban Institute and the Migration Policy Institute. That’s a lot of separated families—roughly the population of Austin or San Francisco. And the one place where any of them have a hope of seeing each other again is Friendship Park.

The documentary “Monument/Monumento,” by filmmaker Laura Gabbert, shows one such reunion, between members of the Ascencio family. Friendship Park reopened to the public in 2012, but access on the U.S. side remains restricted to a few hours on the weekends. The family’s patriarch, who sits in a wheelchair, has traveled some 1,500 miles from Mexico City to be there; his children and grandchildren have driven seven hours from the Central Valley. They have not seen each other in person for two decades.

To enter this impersonal and fortified space, under the watchful gaze of border sentries and cameras, is to willingly lay yourself bare: your love, your longing, your pain. And yet that vulnerability only gets you so close. The intimacies you crave—to smell your daughter’s hair, to squeeze your father’s hand—are impossible. All the questions you have, accumulated over years, are unanswerable in a mere few minutes. And those minutes are precious, so instead you search for your loved one’s eyes through the tiny gaps in that mesh. You smile wide so he or she can see. Here you are at last, face to face, but not together.

Inside The NFL's Tobacco-Style Strategy To Hook Your Kids

They were supposed to die in prison. But thanks to an ingenious discovery, they were given a second chance.

And since then, at least 811 people have lost their lives in jail.

One of the greatest enigmas of 2016, explained.

# 1. Back in the comparatively innocent days of 2015, before Donald Trump completed his hostile takeover of the Republican Party, before the Bernie Sanders juggernaut really got going, Hillary Clinton’s campaign thought it could get ahead through well-crafted policy proposals. On August 10, Clinton was set to unveil a grand plan to help families pay for college tuition, and for months leading up to her speech, the preparation soaked up hundreds of man-hours in conference calls, meetings and email exchanges. The level of seriousness, according to one participant, rivaled that of a White House staff gearing up for a State of the Union address. At the outset, Clinton sat down at her kitchen table with Ann O’Leary, the senior policy adviser who was leading the effort, and made it clear she wanted something ambitious. The motivation was obvious enough, with Americans carrying something like $1.3 trillion in outstanding college debt, and even relatively affluent families struggling to cover tuition bills. “The request was that we think big, bring up ideas regardless of whether they were fully fleshed out or might be controversial,” says Robert Shireman, a former Obama and Clinton administration official who was one of several experts who worked on the plan. Reining in tuition costs is a trickier proposition than you might expect, and not one that money alone can solve. If it became easier for families to pay for college, it would become easier for colleges to hike prices; if Washington put up more funds, states would try to put up less. Plus, Clinton had essentially ruled out increasing deficits or middle-class taxes, limiting the revenue available for any new endeavors. The wonks would have to get freaky. Ultimately, Clinton settled on a scheme the campaign named the “New College Compact.” The goal, making public college debt-free, was simple. The mechanics were not. Families would pay “realistic” fees based on income, with poorer families paying nothing at all. Students would contribute directly through work-study programs. Washington would provide most of the money, but states would have to kick in some funds and hold the line on tuition increases. The feds would also crack down on for-profit colleges where too many students were getting substandard degrees and defaulting on their loans. All in all, the proposal would require some $350 billion in new spending over 10 years, which Clinton planned to pay for by raising taxes on the rich. James Kvaal, a former Obama administration adviser who consulted on the initiative, described it in an email as “a once-in-a-century change in the relationship between the federal government and colleges, on par with the Morrill Act (which created land grant colleges in the 19th Century) and the G.I. Bill.” A few days before Clinton’s speech, O’Leary convened a final conference call to discuss media strategy. Anticipating a lot of attention, she instructed the team to be ready by the phones. Clinton delivered her address at a high school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and afterward, held a press conference in the gym. She got just one query about the plan. Earlier that week, Trump had described Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” during a debate, and so Clinton was grilled on whether Trump should apologize to Kelly, whether he had a problem with women, and what Clinton thought of the fact that Trump had retweeted someone who called Kelly a bimbo.

Over the next 24 hours, the tuition plan received only perfunctory coverage. “The calls just never came,” recalls Gene Sperling, another one of Clinton’s advisers. “It was all Kelly-Trump, 24/7.” Even many professional policy types didn’t grasp the full scope of her proposal; I didn’t realize it myself until I began researching this article. As primary season wore on, her scheme was overshadowed by a bolder, shinier promise from Senator Bernie Sanders: free public college for everyone. The episode was typical of how this election has unfolded. Clinton’s policy operation has churned out more than 60 papers outlining plans for everything from housing for people with serious mental illness to adjusting the cap on loans from the Small Business Administration. The agenda includes extremely big items, like a promise to ensure no family pays more than 10 percent of income on child care, and extremely small ones, like investing in smartphone applications that would make it easier for military families living in remote locations to receive services available only on bases. Some of these ideas are more fleshed-out than others. The childcare plan, for example, is missing crucial details, like a price tag. And because the multitude of initiatives doesn’t cohere under a galvanizing theme, the whole of the agenda can seem like less than the sum of its many, many parts. Even so, Clinton’s plans are as unambiguously progressive as any from a Democratic nominee in modern history—and almost nobody seems to have noticed. The peculiar political dynamics of this election are largely to blame. In Sanders, Clinton drew an opponent whose ideas were even more grandiose than hers. Pretty much anything that Clinton wanted to do, Sanders also wanted to do, but on a bigger scale. Then, after Clinton clinched the nomination, policy dropped out of the conversation almost completely.^[1] “She's got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” Trump told a reporter. “It's just a waste of paper.” In early September, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s policy advisers had quit en masse because not only had the campaign failed to pay them, but he had also made it clear he wouldn’t be requiring their services to prepare for the presidential debates. ^{1. A rare exception was the childcare policy Trump released in September, which was almost comically geared to benefit the rich. He has also issued three completely different versions of his tax plan.} This summer, I stopped by Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, where the policy team occupies prime real estate. The three senior advisors—Jake Sullivan, Maya Harris and Jacob Leibenluft—share an office steps away from those of campaign manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta. (O’Leary is now leading the official transition operation in Washington.) About a dozen more policy aides occupy nearby cubicles, below a sign that says “Nerds” and “Wonks for the Win.” This team manages more than 30 outside working groups that include academic heavyweights^[2] think tank experts and trusted advisers like Sperling and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. It’s an impressive crew, but perhaps over-qualified when it comes to some of the matters that have convulsed this particular election, like the size of Trump’s hands or the semiotics of Pepe the Frog. “It’s not exactly clear what to do with all of that horsepower,” says a person familiar with the process. “There is just this mismatch between capabilities they have and what’s actually required in this campaign.” ^{2. Many of her academic advisers were first reported in a series by Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post. They include economists Joseph Stiglitz, Christina Romer, Simon Johnson, Laura Tyson, Betsey Stevenson, Roland Fryer, Alan Krueger, and Aaron Chatterji; and political scientists Jacob Hacker and Robert Putnam.} People on the campaign assured me that the policy staffers work “the same insane hours as everyone else.” It's just that they’re focusing on November 9, and what Clinton would do if she manages to make it to the White House—where she would face an even less habitable political environment than Obama did. Unlike him, she’ll be entering office without a huge reserve of personal popularity to draw on. She’ll be hemmed in by Republicans on one side and a newly emboldened progressive wing of the Democratic Party on the other. With almost no room to maneuver, Clinton has to find a way to do something good for America. It almost makes the election look like the easy part.

# 2. What She Wants One of Jake Sullivan’s favorite stories about Clinton comes from August 2011, when she was still at the State Department. The recession was over but employment was sluggish, and Obama had asked his Cabinet secretaries to pass along ideas they might have for boosting job creation. Most sent short notes. Clinton submitted a 12-page single-spaced memo,^[3] complete with references. (“Classic Hillary,” was one reaction from within the White House.) ^{3. Among the ideas Clinton suggested were an infrastructure bank, speeding up the retrofit of buildings to make them energy efficient, and taking more aggressive steps to curb currency manipulation by China.} To map out her 2016 agenda, Clinton created a process akin to a college seminar, complete with required reading. She hauled around issue binders and cross-examined the experts who rotated through Brooklyn to brief her. These included Raj Chetty, a Stanford professor and MacArthur “Genius” fellow who is one of the world’s most influential economists. At a lunch session that lasted several hours, Chetty presented his research about the effects of inequality on children. He spoke about an old federal program that had proved more successful than researchers initially realized, and Clinton “got really excited,” Chetty recalls. She told him she had followed the debate over the program since her time as first lady.^{[4] 4. Chetty’s work is based partly on “Moving to Opportunity,” a 1990s initiative in which the government gave families the chance to win lottery vouchers that allowed them to move to more affluent areas. At the time, it was deemed a failure. Using new data, Chetty and his colleagues showed that the young children in families who moved were more likely to attend college and had higher earnings as adults, and were less likely to end up as single parents.} When it came to formulating her own ideas, Clinton wasn’t starting from scratch, obviously. But since her last run for the White House, the Democratic Party had undergone a minor metamorphosis—and in ways that didn’t seem like a natural fit for Clinton, at least as she was perceived by most voters. The progressive wing was clearly ascendant, with groups like Occupy Wall Street and Fight For 15 harnessing populist anger at the financial system, and Black Lives Matter turning an unrelenting spotlight on racial injustice. Minority voters had come to represent a larger proportion of both the party and the population, giving Democrats an electoral-college advantage whose influence was still unclear when Obama ran for office. And there was another trend at work—one that was less obvious, but no less important: In just a few years, the Democratic elite had quietly gone through a once-in-a-generation shift on economic thinking. For most of the past quarter-century, a fight over economic policy has divided the party. It’s helpful to think of it as an argument between two ideological camps that shared basic values, but differed substantially over how to uphold them. On one side, you had liberals, who were convinced that without major government action, people would fall through the cracks of even a healthy economy. They pushed for tougher regulations on business and efforts to reduce inequality, and in some cases demanded stronger protections for workers in trade agreements. On the other side you had centrists, who also supported a strong safety net. But they were more likely to worry that regulations would hamstring businesses. They wanted to liberalize trade and cut government spending to encourage growth, which they thought would ultimately benefit Americans more than big new government programs.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the centrists mostly got their way—not least because his more progressive initiatives quickly withered in Congress. By the time Clinton left office, he had recast the Democratic Party as one that saw a role for markets as well as government in solving social problems. The centrists continued to shape policymaking well into Obama’s first term—their influence clearly visible when, in 2010, Obama turned from job creation to what Paul Krugman described as an “obsessive concern” with deficits. Economist Jared Bernstein, whom Vice President Joe Biden enlisted to hold up the liberal end of policy discussions inside the Oval Office, remembers it as a lonely time. “On numerous occasions when I was in the White House,” he told me, “I would make an argument and there would be typically five to seven people on the other side.” Outside Washington, though, the assumptions underpinning the centrists’ theories were crumbling. The Great Recession did a lot of work by utterly discrediting the notion that Wall Street functioned best when left to its own devices. In addition, some of the biggest names in academia were demonstrating that it wasn’t enough to assume that if the economy was ticking along nicely, everyone would be more or less OK. French economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty showed that inequality had deepened in the U.S. even as the economy grew. David Autor from MIT showed that trade with China had benefited the American economy overall—but that the long-term damage to manufacturing communities was worse than previously assumed. The arguments that liberal economists had been making for years—that active steps must be taken to prevent inequality, that it affects the economy in structurally corrosive ways—were finally gaining broad currency. This “new liberal economics,” as it has been termed by the policy writer Mike Konczal, has now emerged as the orthodoxy within the Democratic Party. And so, in an unexpected turn of events, Hillary Clinton’s economic agenda now stands as a correction of sorts to her husband’s. In speeches, Clinton often says that it’s time to “rewrite the rules” of capitalism—language injected into the debate by the Roosevelt Institute. She talks about the need for the Fed to encourage full employment, not just hold down inflation. “I’m having conversations with people who are on the campaign, with her policy staff, and finding myself on the same page where that wasn’t always the case,” says Bernstein, who has been advising Clinton. That’s partly because there are more liberals in key positions than in Democratic campaigns past—and partly because the centrists sound more like liberals these days. “We’ll see if it sticks,” Bernstein says, “but this is a little inspirational to me.” This new thinking underpins Clinton’s entire domestic platform, which can be roughly divided into three areas. On the economy, her initiatives would pour $275 billion dollars into public works, more than the Recovery Act did. She has endorsed various measures to help unions recover at least some of their lost bargaining power. She has also called for changes to regulations governing both corporations and banks, on the theory that there are too many incentives throughout the system that encourage short-term thinking and risky behavior. The second area may be the most innovative. Clinton has developed a slate of policies to address the fact that as women have moved into the workforce, society has failed to keep pace with the resulting changes in family life. These include guaranteed paid leave, so that workers can take time off to care for a new child or sick relative. She’s also offered measures to improve the quality of childcare and make it a lot more affordable.^{[5] 5. Clinton hasn’t specified exactly how this would work, but has indicated it would be through the tax code, It’s widely assumed that she means something like a scheme suggested by the Center for American Progress in which families would be eligible for tax credits that vary based on income. Unlike the tax deductions proposed by Trump, this scheme would be worth more to people on lower incomes and would not exclude those who have no tax burden.} The third area focuses on the protection of marginalized groups, from African-Americans and Latinos to the LGBT community. Clinton plans to make a major push for comprehensive immigration reform, in a plan that essentially picks up where Obama left off. On criminal justice, she wants to cut mandatory minimum sentences in half, and limit the types of offenses that trigger them. Again, this reflects the party’s shift away from its ‘90s-era incarnation, bolstered by conclusive data that showed that that mandatory minimums put huge numbers of African-American men in jail, undermined families and imposed crippling financial strain on government—without actually reducing crime. “There has been a sea change in the conversation, a change long in the making,” says Harris, the senior policy adviser. The price tag for all of this comes to some $1.6 to $1.7 trillion in new spending over the next decade, according to an independent assessment by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Clinton intends to pay for this by increasing taxes on the wealthy (the assessment found her accounting convincing.) Her plan is less expansive than the one offered by Sanders,^[6] and there are some places where Clinton didn’t go as far as she could have. Instead of a sweeping tax on financial transactions, for instance, she called for a narrow one, relinquishing a potentially huge source of revenue. Still, Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a longtime dissenter from the centrist consensus, told me he was struck by its direction: “Her agenda would have to be seen as more complete, more focused on generating wage growth and jobs than I’ve seen from other candidates [since the 1980s]—and therefore I think it’s more progressive.” And yet this realization hasn’t traveled very far beyond the small world of policy experts and activists. Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist who served in Bill Clinton’s White House and is now advising Hillary, told me: “I don't fully think people are wrapping their heads around the ambition of what she is proposing,” ^{6. Sanders wanted the government to take over health insurance by effectively creating a version of Medicare for everybody, while Clinton has proposed tweaks to the Affordable Care Act that would make its insurance offerings moderately more affordable. Another example is drug pricing. Sanders wanted the government to directly negotiate prices with drug-makers. Clinton has offered a series of mechanisms that would reduce prices but without the same blunt impact. Clinton's plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars; Sanders' would be well into the trillions.} One explanation for this is Hillary Clinton’s reputation as a serial compromiser, or worse, a sellout—the politician who echoed warnings about “super predators” in the 1990s, voted for a bank-friendly bankruptcy bill as a senator and has raked in millions of dollars giving secret speeches to Wall Street. Among her detractors, there are those who acknowledge that her agenda is a squarely progressive one, but they say she is simply bending to the power of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders wing out of political necessity, and could reverse course when in office.

Clinton’s defenders argue—with no little frustration—that she has always been more progressive than people realize. They cite her lifelong advocacy for children and poor families and recall the ugly attacks on her openly professed feminism. “When [Clinton] was first lady back in the 1990s, progressives went to her on issue after issue to advocate for progressive causes inside the White House,” Neera Tanden says, “from saving Social Security to health care to minimum wage to children's issues.” More than one person pointed out that her policy views are often incorrectly assumed to be identical to her husband’s. “Hillary is not Bill,” Bernstein says. “I don’t think she has ever been where he is on trade.” He adds: “I remember talking to her in the 1990s. She recognized that these trade agreements are often just handshakes between investors. I don’t think her husband would have said that.” One longtime Clinton aide told me, “The idea that she's some kind of conservative and not progressive is ridiculous.” Of course, it’s possible for both of these things to be correct. A close reading of her record over the years supports the argument that her instincts in certain areas of domestic policy are genuinely left-leaning. But it’s equally true that she is inclined by nature to work within the bounds of what is politically doable, and that she spends large amounts of her time in the company of the corporate elite. What’s different about 2016 is that, for the first time in her political career, she is facing more concentrated pressure from the left than the center. Her advisers were eager to point out to me that, even though it would have been easy for her to court Republicans by signaling that she would dilute her agenda, she still hasn’t “pivoted.” “What she was for in the primary is what she stands for today,” one aide told me. “There is no change in tone or content.” ## The Seven Pillars Of Hillary Clinton's first term. ### ECONOMY - $500 billion for public works, half to be funded by private investors through an “infrastructure bank.” - Raise federal minimum wage to $12. - Change rules for capital-gains taxes to reward long-term investing, not short-term gains. - Appoint officials who will aggressively enforce labor and consumer regulations. ### WORK AND FAMILY - Up to 12 weeks of paid leave to care for a baby or relative, or to recover from illness. - Tax credits and subsidies to ensure no family spends more than 10 percent of income on childcare. - Matching funds for states that create preschool programs. - Seed money for states to invest in programs that raise salaries for childcare providers. ### EDUCATION - A federal-state program that would allow anybody to study at a four-year public college debt-free. - Free community college. - Debt relief for entrepreneurs and people who pursue public service. - A three-month student-loan repayment moratorium for federal borrowers—via executive action—so debtors can explore options for relief. ### CRIMINAL JUSTICE - Cut mandatory sentence periods in half for nonviolent drug offenses. - Change the definition of offenses that require mandatory sentences so they apply to fewer cases. - Help every police department to purchase body cameras, via matching funds. - $10 billion over 10 years for addiction treatment and recovery. ### HEALTH CARE - Fix Obamacare’s “family glitch,” which makes coverage on the exchanges prohibitively expensive for some low-income families. - More financial assistance for people with private insurance who face high premiums or out-of-pocket costs. - Demand drug companies give Medicare the same discounts that they give Medicaid. - Allow imports of high-cost drugs (or their generic equivalents) from countries where they are cheaper. ### FINANCIAL REFORM - Increase capital requirements for the largest banks and place new rules on the activities of “shadow banks” that engage in the riskiest behavior. - Plug loopholes in the “Volcker Rule” to limit high-risk activity by big banks. - Apply a “risk fee” to the largest financial institutions. - Impose a tax on certain transactions to discourage high-speed traders. ### IMMIGRATION - Comprehensive reform that would allow undocumented immigrants to work legally if they pay taxes and pass a background check. Includes beefed-up border security and a path to citizenship. - Close all private detention facilities - Relief from deportation for more groups—like parents of DREAMers—through executive action if necessary. - Better legal representation for children in deportation proceedings - Allow women and children seeking asylum to stay with relatives. # 3. Why She Might Not Get It Clinton and her team are not delusional—they know that passing her agenda would get very messy, very fast. Even if she manages to pull off a decisive victory, Democrats almost certainly won’t take the House. They may not even regain the Senate. Still, Clinton has identified two top priorities that she believes could plausibly become law early in a first term. The first is a jobs bill that includes some version of her infrastructure proposal. This passes for an “easy” option, since it polls well even with Republicans and is favored by business and labor. The second priority, immigration reform, is the opposite of easy. The political logic is that after Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the Senate was able to pass a bipartisan immigration bill because the GOP wanted to improve its standing with Hispanics. A Trump loss, the theory goes, might motivate the House to do the same. One Clinton confidant described the broader calculation like this: “Do they decide their strategy is, OK, our problem was just this guy and now we’ve rid ourselves of him, so all we have to do is crush Hillary for four years and then we will win the presidency? Or do they decide we have to fundamentally reconstitute things … [that] we can’t just be the party of no, let’s figure out some things we can get done. It will be a huge difference whether they choose door number two or door number one.” > On cooperating with Clinton, a senior House GOP aide said: “I just don’t see where any optimism comes from.” Clinton’s team believes she has several advantages when it comes to Congress. “Part of the optimistic view for me is that Hillary Clinton has a history of actually working across the aisle to get big things done,” says Harris. “She jokes that [Republicans] really like her when she is not running for office.” Harris told me she “strongly believes it is possible to move forward” on key issues like immigration and criminal justice, pointing out that that as First Lady, Clinton teamed up with Senator Orrin Hatch to pass an expansion of children’s health care, and with House majority whip Tom DeLay to pass a bill improving foster care for children. John Podesta observed: “Just being willing to sit in the same room with [DeLay] ought to earn you a merit badge. But she actually got something done.“ (Both Hatch and DeLay have since said that Clinton overstates the extent of their cooperation.) Clinton's inner circle is also placing high hopes on the man who could end up becoming her chief antagonist: Paul Ryan. Last year, the Republican House speaker worked with the White House and Democratic leaders to pass an omnibus spending bill that gave both parties something to smile about in the tax policy department. To one Clinton ally, this signaled that “Ryan and the Republicans, even in the context of an election campaign, are prepared to do business on not-insignificant matters.” This person went on: “The optimistic storyline … is that it’s a precursor to future cooperation and, after an election when you have some kind of wind at your back as a new president, it’d be very difficult for them not to work with you on some of these kinds of things.” Obama, too, once imagined a similar scenario. His 2008 pitch leaned heavily on his willingness to bridge partisan divides. In the run-up to the 2012 election, he mused that an emphatic win might finally cure Republicans of their “fever” for shooting all Democratic initiatives down on sight. The fever never broke. Take Obama’s own attempts to pass an infrastructure bill. Throughout his second term, he pushed for legislation very similar to Clinton’s plan. All he got was some highway and surface funding which Congress was due to reauthorize anyway. The big public works package went nowhere.

People familiar with both leaders insist that Clinton could still succeed where Obama hasn’t. They describe Clinton as both more realistic about the prospects for cooperation with Republicans than Obama was, but also better-equipped to work with her opponents. She’s more willing to sit through arguments she thinks are nonsense, and less likely to assume her adversaries are arguing out of bad faith. She is particularly good at finding common cause even with people who have demonized her. “Her natural style is much more inclined to persistent, relentless engagement with the Hill, trying to lift up the thing they care about, and fold them into a large initiative,” one Clinton ally says. It’s a great theory, until you talk to actual Republicans. If they are more amenable to working with Clinton, they aren’t sharing it, not even in whispers. “I just don’t see where any optimism comes from,” says one senior House Republican aide. “She essentially wants to continue working on the unfinished items on Obama's list, and I don’t see why anybody thinks she’ll have more success in the next four years than he did in the last six.” On infrastructure, the senior aide noted that last year’s transportation bill funds roads until 2022. “We just did a six-year, big-ass highway bill,” the aide says. “I don’t see a whole lot of urgency to do another infrastructure bill.” The aide was even blunter when it came to immigration reform: “I can’t fathom how that would come together.” Pretty much all of the major items on Clinton’s list require new spending, which she plans to fund by boosting taxes on the wealthy. For the GOP, that’s essentially a non-starter. As for the possibility that Democrats could attack Republicans for obstructionism, the senior aide basically shrugged. “That’s baked into our brand already,” the aide said. “What are they going to say about us that they haven’t already said?” It’s not only Republicans who will be giving Clinton headaches—she’ll get plenty of those from Democrats, too. To pass anything at all, she needs to be able to compromise with the GOP without alienating progressives. Inside the Capitol, the consensus is that the only way to get an infrastructure bill is to package the new spending with corporate tax cuts that Republicans covet—for instance, lowering taxes on U.S. companies with operations abroad. Such a move will meet intense skepticism from Sanders or Warren, who basically see it as an invitation for U.S. companies to shift jobs off-shore. (“That is nuts,” Warren wrote in a New York Times op-ed in September.) “I think the politics are now going to be harder from the left,” says one person who has been privy to recent tax reform negotiations in Congress. “I am worried that anything that is attractive enough to Paul Ryan on the corporate side is going to be really hard for the Warren-Sanders side.”

Warren in particular is keenly aware that she has a great deal of leverage in this situation, and so far has proven shrewd at using it. She and her allies find a lot to like in Clinton’s agenda. “They have taken seriously the need to keep the reform-oriented wing of the party happy enough,” one Warren ally says, “and for now they seem to have succeeded.” But it would be a stretch to say that they trust Clinton. In order to ensure that she follows through on her promises, they intend to keep up the pressure.^{[7] 7. Top priorities include making sure Clinton opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and pushes for a higher minimum wage.} Progressives are also laser-focused on executive branch appointments and staffing. As Warren put it to a gathering at the Center for American Progress in mid-September, “personnel is policy.” If Clinton's legislative agenda stalls, the administration’s best hope of realizing its goals will be through the rules that federal agencies issue and how they choose to enforce them. According to Politico, progressive activists are already circulating a list of appointees they would fight, such as Morgan Stanley vice chairman and former State Department official Tom Nides. “He’s the whisperer to Wall Street, and goes around saying she’s not a crazy person, you don't have to worry about her,” says one operative. (Associates of Nides bristle at this description, arguing that some of Washington’s toughest regulators once worked on Wall Street.) Progressives were heartened to see Heather Boushey, a liberal economist who has championed generous work-family policies, join the transition team. And they want more appointees like Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who made use of a decades-old statute that could be used to change overtime rules and make several million more workers eligible for extra pay. People around Clinton are optimistic that they can bring Warren and Sanders into the fold early. “I think she’s going to have to have a lot of conversations with Warren about what’s doable,” one ally says. The idea is to make them feel invested not just in Clinton’s policy agenda, but in the success of her presidency. “Look, Bernie Sanders won 10 million votes. From my personal perspective, that entitles you … to a voice in what the party is trying to accomplish,” one adviser says. “I think that’s an exercise we began in the platform process, through the convention and will continue as we go through the transition if we win.” # 4. Is That All There Is? The Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July was unlike any of the five others that I’ve attended. Over and over, I was struck by the fact that Democrats were proudly showcasing aspects of their agenda or members of their coalition that in previous years they would have sought to downplay. Even in 2008, I couldn’t envision the DNC featuring an undocumented immigrant in primetime, or members of Black Lives Matter, if it had existed then. On the last night, when Clinton took the stage to give her acceptance speech, I perched in the stairwell of a section reserved for some of her special guests. Gabby Giffords was there; and so was Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO; and Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, where Clinton began her career in public policy four decades ago. At one point I felt some scratchy fabric brushing against my hand: It was the sequined dress of Katy Perry, who was slipping past me to reach her seat. The person I was there to watch was policy adviser Ann O’Leary, who has worked with Clinton for many years. The speech, she told me, had been undergoing revisions until 4 a.m. and then final tweaks during the day. O’Leary teared up a bit during the introductory biographical movie, and cheered when Clinton mentioned mental health, an issue O'Leary had worked hard on. When Clinton got to the line, “I sweat the details of policy,” O’Leary reached over to tug at my sleeve. “That’s my favorite part,” she said. As somebody who obsesses over policy, I appreciated it, too. But during this election, and especially as Clinton’s position in the polls has started to slide, I’ve found myself experiencing the wonk’s version of a midlife crisis. Exactly how important is it for a presidential candidate to show off a deep knowledge of policy, to grapple with the complications and trade-offs and come up with something that could work in the real world? Do all those binders matter? The political benefit of an extensive agenda is that it convinces voters the candidate is serious about governing. And Clinton has surely done that. But her platform is so hyper-detailed, so painstakingly constructed to be financially and politically practical that it can obscure something more important: what she stands for. Her agenda lacks the kind of bigger vision or narrative that voters need to be convinced that a candidate is on their side. It’s one reason she finds herself struggling against a candidate who is so unashamedly ignorant and whose agenda would be disastrous for the people he champions. This September, a poll showed nearly half of millennial voters thought Trump would be no different or better than Clinton on student loan policy—despite the fact that Clinton mentions her tuition plan constantly and Trump has barely said a word on the subject.

What all this comes down to, in the end, is the best way to govern in an intractable political moment. In my conversations with Democrats who have worked with both Clinton and Obama, that subject came up a lot. People often remarked that for both politicians, their greatest strength was also their main vulnerability. Obama, people told me, was more likely to set an overarching goal and stick to it no matter what. This turned out to be invaluable in the fight for health care reform and many of his second-term successes, but it limited his overall effectiveness at doing deals with Congress. Clinton, they said, is better at the grind of coalition-building. But at times she can become so immersed in this messy process that she loses sight of her larger aims. If she’d been in Obama’s place when healthcare reform hit the rocks, it’s an open question whether she would have shown the same perseverance. If the worst-case scenario comes to pass, and Clinton can’t enact any big pieces of legislation, that’s when her more incremental style could prove the most useful. Like Obama, Clinton would look to advance her agenda through rules and regulations—in fact, she has a list of executive actions at the ready.^[8] She would also look for opportunities for small legislative wins—tacking an amendment onto a must-pass bill, for instance. Given her greater tolerance for this kind of horse trading, it’s conceivable that she could get further with this approach than Obama did. ^{8. These include the moratorium on student loan repayment and closing all private immigration detention facilities.} The danger here for Clinton is also the danger for liberalism itself—that a lack of major progress on the nation’s core economic challenges will leave voters even more convinced that government cannot, or will not, solve their problems. In 2012, Obama could at least run on the legislation he passed while he still held a congressional majority: health care reform, Dodd-Frank, the auto bailout and the Recovery Act. Come the fall of 2020, Clinton is unlikely to have such a resume. The people in Clinton’s close orbit understand all this. They know that their boss has been preparing herself for this job for much of her adult life. They are confident that she will achieve progress in the White House by drawing on the qualities they admire about her the most: her belief in the potential of public policy to change lives, her tenacity. And they believe that advancing her agenda piece by hard-fought piece, laying the foundation for bigger legislation at some future point when the politics permit it, is a deeply meaningful accomplishment. And yet even her most dedicated allies don't talk about the next four years in terms of a transformative presidency. “Realistically what the secretary has to try to do if she is elected is to generate some momentum—to do enough so people don’t believe Washington is just completely broken and nothing is ever going to happen,” one confidant told me. “Give enough relief to families and communities so they think, ‘OK, it’s not all great but it’s headed in the right direction.’ I think that is achievable.”

One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake.” Schwartz had a reason to be curious about this particular ad. Two years earlier, she had been a member of the advisory panel that reviewed Belsomra for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—and the process had not gone well for the manufacturer, Merck. The company saw its new drug as a major innovation, emphasizing that the medication acted on an entirely different mechanism within the brain than the previous generation of insomnia medicines like Ambien and Lunesta. During the drug’s development, Merck had suggested that it could treat insomnia more effectively and produce fewer side effects than existing medications. In 2012, one Merck scientist described the science underlying Belsomra as a “sea change.” But when Schwartz and her colleagues scrutinized data from the company’s own large-scale clinical trials, what they found was a lot less impressive. People taking Belsomra fell asleep, on average, only six minutes sooner than people taking a placebo and stayed asleep for a mere 16 minutes longer. Some test subjects experienced worrying side effects, like next-day drowsiness and temporary paralysis upon waking. For a number of people, these effects were so severe that the researchers halted their driving tests, fearing someone would get into an accident. Because of these safety concerns, the FDA ended up approving the drug at a lower starting dosage than the company had requested—a dosage so low that a Merck scientist admitted it was “ineffective.” So when Schwartz saw the Belsomra ad, she was struck by how smoothly it sidestepped the drug’s limitations. A soothing voiceover hypes the science, giving a sophisticated explanation of how Belsomra targets a neurotransmitter called orexin to turn down the brain’s “wake messages.” “Only Belsomra works this way,” the voice continues. The ad ends with the young woman curling up with the “sleep” animal and falling into a peaceful slumber. “You have no idea watching that ad that we’re talking about falling asleep 6 minutes faster and staying that way an extra 16 minutes—and that’s at higher doses,” Schwartz said. “We really don't have a great idea of how well it works at the lower dose FDA actually recommends for people starting the medication.” In the United States, commercials like these are simply part of the cultural wallpaper. But just because drug ads are ubiquitous here doesn’t mean they’re a normal way of informing consumers about their medical options. In fact, the U.S. is one of only two developed countries in the world that allow drug companies to advertise their products on television. (The other is New Zealand, which has a population of some 4.5 million people.) One study, from the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 57 percent of claims in drug ads were potentially misleading and another 10 percent were outright false. For a variety of reasons, drug companies are now increasingly relying on direct marketing to American consumers. Last year, the pharmaceutical industry spent $5.2 billion on ads promoting specific drugs—an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. At a time when most other industries are spending less on television advertising, drug companies are spending more. They are also devising new forms of so-called direct-to-consumer outreach, like smartphone apps that consumers may not even realize are a form of marketing and that the FDA is still figuring out how to regulate. (The FDA recently asked Kim Kardashian to delete Twitter and Instagram posts touting a morning sickness pill she was taking, because she hadn’t explained its side effects.) Concerns about direct advertisements of pharmaceutical products have become so acute that last November the American Medical Association called for an outright ban, saying that the practice was “fueling escalating drug prices.” Spending on prescription drugs already accounts for about one in every six dollars that go into medical care. Between 2013 and 2018, the government anticipates that the average annual increase in this spending will be about 7.3 percent—higher than the overall rate of health care inflation. One of the reasons for the increase is the massive sum that manufacturers pour into advertising. Last year, for instance, [Merck spent $96 million promoting Belsomra](https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/09/drug-industry-advertising/). The investment proved to be worth it. Analysts expect the drug to generate more than $300 million in sales this year and to overtake both Ambien and Lunesta as the top-selling insomnia medication sometime within the next decade.  Up until the early 20th century, newspapers were full of ads making outlandish claims about potions and elixirs that were sometimes toxic and nearly always useless, such as Doctor Quenaudon’s Spring Cure, an “extract of green herbs for purifying the blood and the cure of all diseases arising from its impurity, also of all other chronic diseases.” Over time, a series of federal laws, starting with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, took these concoctions off the shelves and put their producers out of business, giving rise to the pharmaceutical industry as we know it. In 1938, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act mandated that the most powerful drugs could only be purchased with a doctor’s prescription. After that, manufacturers focused their promotional efforts exclusively on physicians, running ads in professional journals, dispatching representatives to doctors’ offices, and wooing them with fancy dinners and junkets. But the FDA, which eventually gained authority over both the manufacturing and marketing of drugs, had never actually prohibited mass advertising. In 1981, Merck broke new ground by running a text-heavy, black-and-white advertisement for a pneumococcal vaccine in Reader’s Digest. The following year, Arthur Hull Hayes Jr., the head of the agency, hinted in a speech that the FDA would be OK with such ads. Seizing the moment, Boots Pharmaceuticals created the first-ever television commercial to promote its version of prescription ibuprofen. That’s when the FDA got jittery. It asked the industry to observe a moratorium while the agency came up with some ground rules. Under guidelines released in 1985, the FDA allowed drug companies to run ads that simply raise awareness of a disease without much restriction. But if a company wanted to describe what a drug was supposed to do, it was required to explain the risks. The ads that followed fell heavily into the first category, because companies saw no way to cram sufficient information about side effects into 30-second spots. The companies began pushing for fewer restrictions, and in 1995, they gained a powerful ally in new House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who started beating up on the FDA as a “job killer.” Under pressure from lobbyists and Capitol Hill, the FDA in 1997 produced new guidelines declaring that companies’ ads just had to devote roughly equal time to the risks and benefits of a drug. One year later, spending on television drug ads had more than doubled, from $310 million to $664 million. A major early beneficiary was a new generation of antihistamines that did not make people drowsy. Thanks to the advertising push, first Claritin, then Zyrtec and Allegra became some of the most frequently prescribed medications in America. These antihistamines represented a meaningful improvement for allergy suffers. The same could not be said for other drugs that manufacturers began promoting with multimillion-dollar campaigns. Take the case of Nexium, which is now infamous in the world of health care policy. Until the 1980s, doctors had treated acid reflux with over-the-counter pills, like Tums, that counteracted the effects of stomach acid. Then, in 1990, a drug went on the market that reduced the production of acid itself. Prilosec would become a moneymaking monster, with sales reaching $6 billion a year. But AstraZeneca, the company that ended up marketing it, knew these profits would last only as long as the drug’s patent, which was set to expire in 2001. So it launched a desperate bid to find a replacement—an effort named “Project Shark Fin” because the graph of Prilosec’s expected revenues rose and fell like an inverted V. Eventually, researchers produced Nexium, which AstraZeneca promoted as a new, improved acid inhibitor. Chemically speaking, however, Nexium was extremely similar to Prilosec. There was little evidence that it was better than Prilosec or new generic alternatives. In fact, public health experts argued that many people taking acid inhibitors didn’t need medications at all—they needed to change their diets. But the advertising blitz worked: Within two years of its release, Nexium had surpassed Prilosec in sales; by 2010, it had surpassed Lipitor, the anti-cholesterol drug, as the highest selling drug of all. > The best thing I heard experts say about Belsomra was that it was no worse than any of the other drugs out there. The first marketing efforts for Belsomra appeared not long after the FDA had approved the medication, in the summer of 2015. Anyone who saw them might not have realized what was being sold, since many didn’t mention Belsomra—or any sleep drug—at all. There was a website, WhySoAwake.com, which focused on sleep science, and a related Twitter feed, which now has more than 60,000 followers. Merck also worked with the nonprofit National Sleep Foundation to develop [BeyondTired.org](https://beyondtired.org/), a site where people with insomnia talk about their experiences. And there was an iPhone app called SleepGuru, which allowed users to monitor their sleep activity. For pharmaceutical companies, the great advantage of such “unbranded” advertising is that, since the ads don’t make claims about specific drugs, they aren’t legally required to talk about side effects, either. Like the fuzzy animal commercial, the unbranded campaign for Belsomra told a compelling story about new developments in the field of sleep research. Older insomnia drugs try to induce sleep by making the brain more receptive to chemical signals that make people drowsy. Over the last two decades, scientists have developed an understanding of a separate set of chemical signals that make people alert. The WhySoAwake site gives a cartoonish version of this story, and a link on one page takes visitors to the Belsomra site, which explains that it is the only drug that acts to quiet the wake signals. In Merck’s last quarterly earnings call for 2015, Adam Schechter, the president for global human health, linked the drug’s sales success directly to these marketing efforts. “With regard to Belsomra, I think we started off with a really good launch and we had nice growth,” he said. “It then flattened a little bit. We ran direct-to-consumer advertising and we saw an increase again in … volume.” When drug companies defend their use of advertising, they often argue that it performs a valuable public service. A much-aired commercial might prompt patients to discuss conditions they never knew they had, the logic goes, or reduce the stigma around certain diseases. If you see ads for depression or irritable bowel syndrome every night while eating dinner, you might feel less embarrassed asking your doctor about it. Critics of direct-to-consumer advertising acknowledge these benefits. But when the people raising awareness about a condition are the same people selling a drug to treat it, some rather obvious problems arise. Ads rarely provide the kind of context consumers need to make good decisions about their health—about how often a drug actually works or whether an alternative treatment might be better. I asked Dominick Frosch, a senior scientist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute who has published widely on how patients make decisions, to review the Belsomra television spot with the fuzzy animals. “The ad promotes a very clear story as to what causes insomnia … that somehow insomnia is a problem of your neurotransmitters,” Frosch said. “They are giving you a very one-sided explanation of what causes insomnia, and of course into that cause fits this particular drug.” > Policymakers in Europe and Australia have decisively rejected proposals that allow American-style drug advertising. There’s a well-established body of research showing that advertising plays a critical role in a drug’s popularity. In one of the most famous studies of direct-to-consumer advertising, a team of researchers from Canada and the U.S. studied consumer behavior in two demographically similar cities: Sacramento and Vancouver. The U.S. consumers, deluged with ads for prescription drugs, were more than twice as likely to ask for a drug they’d heard about as the consumers in Canada, which doesn’t allow such ads. In another study, researchers trained actors to seek medical help for symptoms that resembled depression at different levels of severity. The good news was that most people with symptoms warranting medication received drugs. The bad news was that most people without symptoms warranting medication also received drugs. Just over half of that latter group came away from their physician’s office with a prescription for a drug they’d asked about after seeing an ad on TV. Companies like Merck point out that their ads always instruct patients to consult a physician. And it’s true that doctors aren’t supposed to prescribe medication unless they think it makes sense clinically. But as multiple studies have shown, doctors often give patients the particular brand-name drugs they ask for, even when a cheaper generic version is available. Pharmaceutical companies are eager to exploit this fact, because promoting drugs to doctors has become harder than it used to be. In 2002, the federal government prohibited pharmaceutical companies from providing financial incentives or other “tangible benefits” to physicians who prescribe their drugs. In the last few years, it has begun prosecuting apparent violations through anti-kickback statutes. “In the old days, pharmaceutical representatives were always taking docs out to dinners, bringing them Cuban cigars, taking them to Yankee games in the box seats,” said Stephen Hoelper, a veteran drug marketing executive and vice president for sales and marketing at MediSolutions. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services “doesn’t like that and says that if you induce a physician to prescribe a product, then you are potentially making health care more expensive.” Meanwhile, the employers and insurers who pay most of America’s medical bills have been looking for ways to discourage excessive prescribing in an attempt to rein in costs. Most private insurance plans have formularies, or lists of approved drugs, managed by special companies called “pharmaceutical benefit managers.” These firms negotiate with drugmakers over prices and divide medications into tiers, forcing patients to pay more out of their own pockets for certain expensive drugs. Brand-name sleeping pills frequently end up in the tiers requiring higher co-pays, which means the pharmaceutical companies must work even harder to convince consumers that the drugs are worthwhile. Finally, during the past decade, drug companies have simply had fewer genuine game-changing drugs coming onto the market. With the exception of occasional breakthroughs for diseases like hepatitis C, it is becoming harder and harder to find drugs that offer clear-cut clinical advantages over existing treatments. Between 2003 and 2011, the success rate for clinical trials fell, the time from trial to approval rose, and the ratio of approved drugs to trial drugs declined. These are all signs that the drug pipeline is drying up. Innovation could pick up again, but in the meantime, drug companies have been spending much of their time pushing drugs of questionable clinical advantage, or persuading viewers to seek medication for “a disease that may be hard to distinguish from normal behavior in most cases,” according to Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who focuses on the drug industry. In his field, the tactic is known as “disease mongering.” And to critics of consumer drug advertising, Belsomra is a perfect example of these practices at work.  The insights about separate sleep and wake mechanisms represent real scientific advances, as Ian Parker documented in a [2013 account](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-big-sleep-2) of Belsomra’s development for The New Yorker. Someday, the discovery might even lead to major advances in treatment. But those advances have not yet been made. All of the sleep medicine experts I interviewed emphasized that therapy and behavioral changes remain the best treatments for insomnia. Like most other sleep drugs, Belsomra provides only mild relief. “Clinically meaningless” is the way one sleep expert, Gregg Jacobs from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, [described](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sleeping-pills-belsomra-side-effects_us_55ef38eee4b093be51bc7b0f) Belsomra’s effects. “Almost none of the patients I see are taking Belsomra because it does not work,” Jacobs said. The best thing I heard experts say about Belsomra was that it was no worse than any of the other drugs out there. In response, a Merck spokesperson pointed out that in one of its trials, Belsomra patients slept half an hour longer than people taking the placebo. However, the sample for that trial was just 62 people. Larger, more predictive trials found that Belsomra had much weaker effects. In a January 2016 report, the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices [analyzed](https://www.ismp.org/quarterwatch/pdfs/2015Q2.pdf) more than 1,000 consumer complaints that the FDA had received about Belsomra between February and July 2015—a number the institute described as “substantial.” A large number came from patients who complained that the drug was ineffective. Others reported that they had experienced side effects including sleep paralysis and next-day drowsiness. There were also reports of suicidal thoughts and attempts, two of which were successful. Merck correctly points out that the side effects correspond to the ones the company included on the warning label. There is also no way to definitively prove a link between these particular complaints and the drug, particularly when it comes to the suicides. Still, in its report the institute noted that the trials of Belsomra had not tested the drug’s effect on people taking antipsychotics or antidepressants, even though insomnia is a “key symptom” of depression and anxiety. It concluded, “The preapproval trials of [Belsomra] had so many limitations that it was challenging to draw any valid conclusions about what might happen when a new kind of hypnotic is marketed to a patient population measured in tens of millions."  “We all want consumers … to be highly engaged in their health care, and certain advertisements can do that. But it can also lead to a lot of overtreatment,” said David Grande, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively on drug advertising, “It’s not as if we live in an imaginary world where messages in advertising are being driven by what’s important, rather than what makes more money.” On multiple occasions, policymakers in Europe and Australia have considered and decisively rejected proposals to allow companies to advertise specific drugs there. In 2002, the European Parliament voted down legislation that would have allowed the direct advertising of medications to treat HIV/AIDS, asthma and diabetes. "If we open the door to direct advertising it is a slippery slope down the American road where pink pills on television advertisements offer a miracle solution to everything from baldness to chronic fatigue,” Catherine Stihler, a Labour Party representative from Scotland, said at the time. “Medicines are like no other product. The aim must not be to maximise sales but to ensure that the product is used appropriately." In the U.S., a similar ban on ads for specific drugs would face a slew of First Amendment challenges in the courts. But there are plenty of other remedies available. Democrats in Congress have [proposed](http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2211:delauro-introduces-the-responsibility-in-drug-advertising-act&catid=2&Itemid=21) prohibiting advertising until a drug has been on the market for a few years, giving health care professionals more time to see how the drug worked in the wider population. Another possibility, which Hillary Clinton has endorsed, would be to make advertising less attractive to drugmakers by barring them from writing off the associated costs on their tax returns. The FDA could seek to review all ads before they air and reject those that make false or misleading claims. It could also require ads to include more information about how often a drug is effective or whom it actually helps. Lisa Schwartz has been working with the FDA and consumer advocates to develop a better model for presenting this kind of information. Along with her husband and fellow researcher, Steven Woloshin, she started a company that is creating “drug facts boxes” for different medications. The idea is to translate the gobbledygook that appears in prescription package inserts or those fine-print full-page magazine ads into language that average consumers can understand. After Belsomra hit the market, Consumer Reports asked Schwartz to create a label for it. Her version [presents](http://static2.consumerreportscdn.org//content/dam/cro/news_articles/health/PDFs/CR-DrugFactsBox-Belsomra.pdf) the data on the drug in an even-handed way, noting that its ability to aid sleep is “modest” at the highest approved doses. “Short track record means that new, unexpected side effects are possible,” it explains. “Since this drug has a different way of acting than other insomnia drugs, the experience with it is particularly limited.” The label gives brief details on alternative remedies for insomnia, like cutting down on caffeine. Finally, it lists Belsomra’s known side effects. Not included on the list but probably warranted: skepticism.

On an early Friday morning in late June 2006, Cheyenne Szydlo, a 33-year-old Arizona wildlife biologist with fiery red hair, drove to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim to meet the river guide who would be taking her along the 280 miles of the Colorado River that coursed a mile below. She was excited. Everyone in her field wanted to work at the Grand Canyon, and after several years of unsuccessful applications, Szydlo had recently been offered a seasonal position in one of the National Park Service’s science divisions. She’d quit another job in order to accept, certain her chance wouldn’t come again. The Grand Canyon is a mecca of biological diversity, home to species that grow nowhere else on earth. But after a dam was built upstream 60 years ago, changes in the Colorado’s flow have enabled the rise of invasive species and displaced numerous forms of wildlife. Szydlo’s task was to hunt for the Southwestern willow flycatcher, a tiny endangered songbird that historically had nested on the river but hadn’t been seen in three years. Her supervisor believed the bird was locally extinct, but Szydlo was determined to find it. The June expedition—a nine-day journey through the canyon on a 20-foot motorboat operated by a boatman named Dave Loeffler—would be her last chance that summer. When Szydlo asked a coworker what Loeffler was like, the reply was cryptic: “You’ll see.” Szydlo, who’d studied marine biology in Australia and coral reefs in French Polynesia, was drawn to the adventurous nature of the work. “From my earliest memories,” she told me, “there was never any place that felt safer or happier to me than the outdoors.” On the morning of the trip, she arrived at the boat shop early. She assumed they’d leave at once, to make the most of the day. Instead, she said, Loeffler took her to a coworker’s house, and for an hour and a half, she sat uncomfortably as Loeffler told his friend about the battery-powered blender he’d packed to make “the best margaritas on the river.” They set out from Lees Ferry in Marble Canyon, the otherworldly antechamber to “the Grand.” From there, the river winds through towering, striated red cliffs and balancing rock formations, under the Navajo Bridge, and, at around mile 60, into the Grand Canyon itself. The views are stupefying, the waters turquoise, and the disconnection almost total—a moonscape beyond cell phone reception. For many people, it’s a spiritual experience. It’s also an intimate one. Travelers eat and sleep together, and, due to the lack of cover, must often bathe and go to the bathroom in full view, using portable metal ammo cans outfitted with toilet seats. Commercial river guides often say that no one can claim their privacy on the river, so fellow passengers should offer it instead. In Szydlo’s recounting of the trip, Loeffler didn’t adhere to this code. When she bent to move provisions or tie up the boat, he commented on a logo on the back of her utility skirt. He asked frank questions about her sex life and referred to Szydlo as “hot sexy biologist.” That June, the temperatures at the bottom of the canyon reached 109 degrees, and when Szydlo scorched her skin on a metal storage box, Loeffler said she had a hot ass. He adjusted her bra strap when it slipped and, one chilly night, invited her to sleep in the boat with him if she was cold. When they stopped to take a picture at a particularly scenic spot, he suggested that she pose naked. He told her that another female Park Services staffer would be hiking in to meet them at the halfway point, and that he hoped they would have “a three-way.” Szydlo told me she laughed uncomfortably and spoke often of her boyfriend and their plans to get married. By the third day of the trip, it seemed to Szydlo that Loeffler was getting increasingly frustrated. They stopped at a confluence where the Colorado meets a tributary and forms a short tumble of rapids gentle enough for boaters to swim through with a life jacket. Szydlo pulled on her preserver, but Loeffler insisted she didn’t need one. When she entered the river without it, the water sucked her under. She somersaulted through the rapids “like I was in a washing machine,” she recalled. She thought she was going to drown. Then the rapids spat her out into a calm, shallow pool. She came up gasping and choking to the sound of Loeffler’s laughter, and thought to herself, “I’m in deep shit.” We’re used to hearing stories of sexual harassment in the Army, the Navy, or within the police force; 25 years after the Tailhook scandal, when scores of Marine and Naval officers allegedly sexually assaulted some 83 women and seven men at a military convention, there’s a general cultural understanding of what women face in traditionally male-dominated public institutions. The agencies that protect America’s natural heritage enjoy a reputation for a certain benign progressivism—but some of them have their own troubling history of hostility toward women. In 2012 in Texas, members of the Parks and Wildlife Department complained about a “legacy” of racial and gender intolerance; only 8 percent of the state's 500 game wardens were women. In 2014, in California, female employees of the U.S. Forest Service filed a class-action lawsuit—the fourth in 35 years—over what they described as an egregious, long-standing culture of sexual harassment, disparity in hiring and promotion, and retaliation against those who complained. (That lawsuit is still pending.) And this January, the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General announced that it had “found evidence of a long-term pattern of sexual harassment and hostile work environment” in the Grand Canyon’s River District, a part of the Park Service. Ever since the U.S. created institutions to protect its wilderness, those agencies have been bound up with a particular image of masculinity. The first park rangers in the U.S. were former cavalrymen, assigned to protect preserves like Yellowstone and Yosemite from poachers and fire. The public quickly became enamored by these rugged, solitary figures. In the early 1900s, as the Park Service was created, a new breed emerged: naturalists who endeavored to teach the public the principles of conservation. As the historian Polly Welts Kaufman has written, the earlier generation of rangers resented the intrusion of “pansy-pickers” and “butterfly chasers.” Also controversial was the presence of a small number of women at the agency. Male naturalists worried that their job would be seen as effeminate, instead of, as one put it, “the embodiment of Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing.” In the 1930s and ‘40s the ranks were mostly filled by returning veterans attracted by the ranger corps’ quasi-military culture. Until 1978, female rangers weren’t permitted to wear the same uniform or even the same badge as the men, but instead wore skirts modeled on stewardesses’ uniforms.  Park ranger or Pan Am stewardess? (National Park Service)  Enid Michael, a park ranger in the 1920s, overdressed for her dance with a bear. (National Park Service.) The other major institution tasked with preserving and managing the American wilderness, the Forest Service, developed on a similar trajectory. Although the Forest Service comes under the direction of the Department of Agriculture (while the Park Service falls under the DOI), its employees perform similar work and its culture is also modeled along military lines. By the 1970s, women held only 2 percent of full-time professional roles in the service nationwide. In California—whose lands are the crown jewel of the national forest system— female employees filed a class-action lawsuit known as _Bernardi v. Madigan_. The case was settled in 1981 with a court-enforced “consent decree” that required the Forest Service’s California region to employ as many women as the civilian workforce—at least 43 percent in every pay grade. The decision ultimately saw hundreds of “Bernardi women” enter the service, to the disgruntlement of many male employees. Lesa Donnelly is a former Forest Service administrator who worked for the agency from 1978 to 2002. In 1994, she filed a complaint charging that three of her male colleagues were harassing her. After word spread (incorrectly) that she planned to file a class-action lawsuit, she received dozens of calls. She heard from women who claimed they were being threatened with physical and sexual assault, and women who said they’d been punished for making complaints. One said the men on her crew joked about raping her in her sleep and had tied her blood-stained underwear to the antenna of their fire truck. Two women told her that a notice in their office about the Bernardi consent decree had been defaced with a scrawled reference to the “cuntsent decree.” She realized her own complaint was “nothing compared to what I found out was happening.” Eventually, Donnelly compiled claims from 50 women, and in 1995 she filed a class-action suit against the Forest Service, including declarations from many of the woman who had reached out to her. The agency negotiated a settlement that allowed for continued court oversight of California’s Forest Service. But when the monitoring period ended in 2006, the old problems soon resurfaced, as Donnelly would describe in testimony to Congress two years later. One dispatcher reported that she’d been sexually assaulted and stalked by a manager. He was made to resign, but after six months the Forest Service tried to work with him again. In 2008, a male supervisor at the same forest said that he hated a black female employee and wanted to shoot subordinates he hated. When the employee reported the comment, the district ranger told her to ignore him. This year, I met Donnelly, who is 58, in El Dorado Hills, outside Sacramento. Now the vice president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, a civil rights group, she has the demeanor of a friendly bulldog. She told me that nearly every year for the last 15 years, she has traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby the USDA, Congress, and the White House to protect women in the service. She managed to enlist the help of representatives Jackie Speier of California, Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who in 2014 petitioned the USDA to investigate, without success. Each time Donnelly comes to D.C., she added, she brings details of 20 to 25 new allegations. But while her fight against the Forest Service has persisted for more than two decades, in the Grand Canyon, similar questions about the treatment of women have only started to surface. “On the river, the boatman is god,” Cheyenne Szydlo told me. In the Grand Canyon, river guides enjoy an almost exalted status, revered for their ability to “read water.” Boatmen have almost total responsibility for their passengers—they keep the food and determine when and where to sleep, explore, or go to the bathroom. They also control the satellite phone, the only means of contact with the outside world. But within the Park Service, boatmen were more important still. Men like Dave Loeffler guided visiting officials or VIPs on adventures within the canyon, undertook rescue missions, and were featured in travel stories in newspapers and magazines. They “made it seem [to park management] like the river was the surface of Mars,” one boatman for a private company recalled. The administration saw them as irreplaceable. In the early 2000s, three men turned the boat shop into a small fiefdom. There were the “two Daves”—Loeffler and his supervisor, Dave Desrosiers—and Bryan Edwards, the boat shop manager. In addition to this small core of permanent staffers, the park periodically hired intermittent boatmen. One, Dan Hall, worked in the canyon during this period and was friendly with the trio. Hall is garrulous and not remotely prudish. “I have offended people I’ve worked with,” he told me. “I do my best to apologize and not let it happen again …. But with the Daves, it had this very dark side to it.” He remembered the three talking about who could sleep with the most women on the river. “They were always on the make,” he said. In a written response sent via Facebook, Edwards said that “no competition ever existed.” Rafting on the Colorado has always had a bit of a party vibe, and that attitude held for Park Service trips, too. Boats sometimes carried a large quantity of alcohol. Participants sometimes hooked up. But during the early 2000s, Hall told me, it seemed short-lived river affairs were almost expected of female employees. According to one former employee, veteran female staffers warned new hires to make sure they set up tents with a friend rather than sleeping on the boats, as the boatmen usually did. Sometimes, Hall said, boatmen would lobby supervisors to send women from completely unrelated park divisions—an attractive new hire at the entry booth, for instance—on trips. Often, though, the targets were from science divisions that required river access, such as vegetation and wildlife. The field leader of the vegetation program from 2002 to 2005, Kate Watters, said that she complained to her supervisor about the boatmen’s behavior. In October 2005, an expedition was planned to see if the two groups could overcome their difficulties. The trip was led by Bryan Edwards. Participants included Watters, who was married to Dan Hall at the time, and her new intern, a biologist I’ll call Anne. > “I did flash a camera below her skirt as she stood next to me,” Edwards said. “It was intended for shock value only.” The expedition coincided with Halloween week, and one night most of the participants put on costumes. Many were drinking. Anne—dressed as a butterfly, in wings and a dress—was in the camp’s kitchen area, when Edwards—dressed as a pirate—came up behind her. He grabbed the camera she’d left on the table. “The next thing I knew, his hand was between my legs,” she said. Then Edwards shot a picture up her skirt. Watters observed aloud that Edwards’ behavior was unacceptable. Loeffler, who was attired as “a hillbilly axe murderer” and carrying a real axe, demanded that Watters talk it out with Edwards instead of filing a report. She recalled that he bellowed at her, axe in hand, “Fuck you, Kate Watters. You can’t have control over people’s jobs.” Loeffler told me that he was unable to answer questions since he is still a park employee. Edwards wrote in his response, “I did flash a camera below her skirt as she stood next to me. It was intended for shock value only” as Anne had been drinking, he explained. Watters said that in a meeting after her return with Edwards and Desrosiers’ boss, Edwards glared at her and cleaned his nails with a 6-inch buck knife. (Edwards called this description “entirely false.”) In 2006, he received a 30-day suspension over the incident, after which he resigned. Edwards confirmed this to me, but wrote in another message, “I suspect nearly everything you have been told is at least either ‘misrepresentation’ or outright lie.” He felt that he had done “a lot of good in my 12 yrs in Grand Canyon,” he went on. “Because of my abilities, I did things people dreamed about doing but simply could not on that River and dealt with their envy and accusations constantly.” Edwards added, “But as the joke goes: ‘ ... ach, you fuck one sheep!’” Following Edwards’ resignation, relations between the boat shop and vegetation devolved into a cold war. On trips, according to multiple sources, some of the boatmen withheld food or avoided taking volunteers to work sites. Watters complained to the director of the science division and to regional Park Service authorities. After getting nowhere, she quit in frustration and Anne eventually assumed her place. According to Anne and Hall, Loeffler later showed up at a campsite where Anne was working to harangue her about Edwards. He and Desrosiers made it so difficult for her to schedule trips that sometimes she had to use a helicopter, at great expense. These acts of sabotage “became an art form for the two Daves,” recalled Hall. The pair even erected a memorial to Edwards in the boat shop, said two former employees: a crude bust of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns with Edwards’ name written on the base in Sharpie. The implication was clear: Edwards had been martyred. It was around the time of Edwards’ departure that Szydlo took her boat trip with Loeffler. After the scare in the rapids, she said, the uneasy balance between them shifted. Szydlo stopped laughing at his come-ons. Loeffler would sleep in late and then tell her they didn’t have time to visit her next work site. “This person was in complete control of everything I needed to survive,” she said. “I was terrified.” She began to formulate a plan to get out of the canyon if she needed to. “Even if there were trails to take, which in most places there were not, they'd land me in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, up on the rim,” she said. “I didn't have enough food or water to attempt that.” She could try to hike out on the Bright Angel Trail when they reached the halfway point at Phantom Ranch. But doing so would mean missing the nesting sites on the lower half of the river—and, she feared, abandoning any hope of being hired back next season. The day before they reached Phantom Ranch, Szydlo said she felt as if some kind of assault was inevitable. Loeffler slowed the motorboat to a crawl, stopping at nearly every beach. Finally, in the middle of a channel, she heard the motor go quiet. Loeffler came up behind her, grabbed her shoulders and asked her to describe her sexual fantasies so he could act them out. “I broke down crying,” Szydlo said. “Saying, ‘Get off me, stop harassing me.’ As soon as I used the word ‘harassment,’ he was like, ‘Whoa, stop. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” He revved the engine and sped to Phantom Ranch. For the last five days, she said, they barely spoke, and at meals, Loeffler gave her minuscule portions. After she returned, she emailed her then-boyfriend and told him what had happened. Szydlo worried for months about whether she should file a report. When she finally contacted an HR representative almost six months later, she said, she received a brief response informing her she’d need dates, times and witnesses in order to pursue a complaint. She let it drop, not wanting to start a “huge, ugly fight.” Much as she suspected, other women in similar situations have discovered that taking formal action can bring on its own host of problems. The Eldorado National Forest is a mountainous expanse of nearly 1,000 square miles that stretches from east of Sacramento to the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Denice Rice has worked here for 15 years as a firefighter—on engines and fire crews and as a prevention officer. These days, she likes to operate by herself, driving a truck with a small reserve of water through the hundreds of miles of back roads that cut into the Eldorado. She is often the first on the scene at a fire, helping direct in crews of “hot shots,” the firefighting elite who clear the tree line. On slower days, she might serve as “Smokey’s wrangler,” accompanying the unlucky staffer who has to don the sweaty mascot costume and make safety presentations to kids. Many women in the Forest Service told me that “fire is a small world,” and that they repeatedly had to fight the perception that they were only there to meet men. Rice, who exudes a no-bullshit air of competence, prided herself on her toughness. When I visited her at her home in January, she drove to meet me on a four-wheeler, flanked by two bulldogs. “When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin,” she said. Around 2008, Rice was a captain being groomed for promotion when she was befriended by her boss’ boss, a division chief named Mike Beckett. After about a year, their interactions took on a different tone. By Rice’s account, Beckett would describe sexual dreams he’d had about her and comment on her body. When they texted about work, he responded with crass double entendres. He cornered her in the office, followed her into the bathroom, and tried to touch her or lift her shirt. She said he groped or touched her inappropriately at least 20 times. Even when she was out in the field, Rice felt as if there was no escape. Sometimes Beckett would wait late for her to return to the office. He took to radioing in to ask her location and seemed to monitor the line for word of her whereabouts: He’d appear, unannounced, when she was in some remote location—say, a tower lookout high in the Sierras. “He was paying a lot of attention to an employee three to four pay grades below him, which is uncommon,” recalled Rice’s former direct supervisor, who still works at the Forest Service. “He was constantly going around me.” It became so uncomfortable that Rice stopped calling in her location—a significant safety risk. Eventually, Beckett arranged for her to be moved out of the office she shared with a colleague and into a room on her own. It was more of a storage area, recalled the former supervisor, tucked in the back of the building. During this time, her oversight duties were stripped from her one by one, Rice later said in a signed affidavit, and the former supervisor confirmed in an interview. (Beckett declined to answer any questions, and the Forest Service said it couldn’t comment on specific allegations.) Still, Rice was reluctant to take formal action. She didn’t want to be “one of those women,” she explained. “You don’t cry in front of the guys, you don’t show weakness in front of them. And you don’t file. You just don’t file. You suck up and deal.” But one day in 2011, she said, after three years of harassment, Beckett came into her office and, with a letter opener, poked her repeatedly on her chest, drawing a circle around her nipple. She filed. Randy Meyer, the Eldorado union steward, said he got a phone call from Rice “that scared me to death. She was highly emotional and beside herself.” He told a senior forest manager that he was prepared to alert the police—and “then everybody and his brother got involved in this mess.” In the ensuing investigation, some 30 of Rice’s and Beckett’s colleagues were interviewed about humiliating details that Rice hadn’t even confided to her husband. “Everybody knew that he took me in the bathroom, tried to take my clothes off, things that he would say to me: ‘I want to watch you pee.’ They all knew,” she said. “And I still work with these people.” Rice said she got sick from the stress. The supervisor added that once, after he went to check on Rice, Beckett threatened him with disciplinary action. In 2012, at the district ranger’s request, Rice’s supervisor called an all-hands meeting. Rice was certain that Beckett would be on the agenda. She begged not to have to attend, but said she was required to show up. (Rice’s former supervisor couldn’t verify this, but said the meeting was handled insensitively: “Nobody took into consideration that maybe she was still feeling like the target in the case.”) The situation with Beckett was discussed in front of at least 50 colleagues; Rice walked out in tears. “I think that was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. When we spoke, Rice was jumpy and broke down several times. “I can’t go anywhere without wondering, ‘Do people know who I am?’” she said. One male firefighter who has worked with Rice for five years told me, “It changed her whole life. People know Denice’s story on the forest, so she has this cloud around her. I’ve seen it for four years. I see Denice ‘trigger’ all the time: in classroom settings, out in the woods.” Ultimately, the ranger in charge of the investigation recommended that Beckett should be fired. But Beckett retired before any action could be taken. Meanwhile, Rice’s career has effectively stalled. The firefighter who worked with Rice requested anonymity, explaining, “If the powers that be tie me to her in any way, I’ll never promote here again.” Rice’s ordeal wasn’t unique. Lesa Donnelly said that in her capacity as an advocate, she has been contacted by scores of women in the service in California who allege they’ve been punished for pursuing sexual harassment complaints. One 22-year-old forestry technician filed a claim, and, several days afterwards, was visited by officials who searched only her side of the barracks with a drug dog. According to a subsequent complaint she lodged with the Forest Service, her roommate told her that one official had remarked, “You guys must have pissed someone off.” The woman left the service soon afterwards. Elisa Lopez-Crowder, a 34-year-old Navy veteran, was hired as a firefighter in 2010. She ran 45-pound sections of hose into the forest and cleared live trees to create fuel breaks. In her first months on the Eldorado, she said, an assistant captain asked her whether she’d been a “bitch” or a “slut” in the Navy, and whether her skin was really that color or just dirty. One day while she was clearing brush, she claimed, he hoisted her by her line gear and threw her to the ground; according to a male coworker’s account, he held her down with his foot. The coworker intervened, and later joined her to report the matter to their captain. The assistant captain was briefly placed on administrative leave. (In a court declaration he said Lopez-Crowder had “tripped” and that “before I helped her up, I jokingly placed my foot on her pack.”) While an investigation was still underway, he was assigned to the same work sites as Lopez-Crowder. About a year later, she traveled with Donnelly and other Forest Service women to bring their concerns to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in Washington, D.C. Lopez-Crowder said Vilsack apologized and assured her that the assistant captain had been removed from his position; it fell to Lopez-Crowder to tell the secretary that he was still on the Forest Service payroll. A short time later, the assistant captain left the force. Lopez-Crowder transferred out of the firefighting division anyway, fearing that she had become a target. “In the years I served in the military,” she said, “I never encountered such discrimination and harassment as I have working for the U.S. Forest Service.” Alicia Dabney, a mother of three who lives on the Tule River Indian reservation, became a firefighter, like her father and uncles before her, at the age of 26 in the Sequoia National Forest. According to Equal Employment Opportunity complaints she filed in 2011 and 2012, Dabney claimed that coworkers made disparaging remarks about her Latina and Comanche heritage and joked about sexually assaulting women. She said a male supervisor instructed her and another female firefighter to tell him when they began menstruating. At a training academy, other participants left lewd sexual propositions on her [voicemail](http://www.marshacoleman-adebayo.com/women-whistle.html). One day she arrived at work to find the floor of the engine house strewn with printouts that read “Alicia Dabney The Whore.” (She provided a photo of the printouts.) Some of the harassment was physical. Once, a male coworker jumped on her neck, “riding me like a big horse,” she recalled. On an assignment in Texas, she said, a supervisor put her in a chokehold and threw her on his hotel bed. A USDA investigation substantiated the first of those incidents but denied that there had been a “pattern of harassment.” In 2012, Dabney was informed that the Forest Service was initiating her termination, claiming she had omitted part of her criminal record—a misdemeanor vandalism charge—and failed to disclose federal debt on her application. (Dabney maintains that she disclosed both.) In 2013, Dabney left and signed a settlement agreement with the Forest Service. In 2011, the USDA put the Forest Service into temporary receivership for its failure to adequately respond to sexual harassment claims. For the next year, all EEO complaints were handled by the secretary’s office in Washington. Tom Tidwell, the chief of the Forest Service, explained in an email to staff that the change would allow the agency “to better process a series of EEO complaints within the Forest Service that, frankly, we have not handled well.” In the Canyon’s River District, the problems had continued unabated since Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip. Certain boatmen were repeatedly accused of harassing or assaulting women in strikingly similar scenarios. One young boatman covered his Park Service boat hatch with pictures of topless women and boasted to coworkers, including Dan Hall, about a side gig recruiting college women for Girls Gone Wild-style videos. Hall said that half a dozen intermittent boatmen who, like him, objected to the boat shop’s culture, found themselves blacklisted from river assignments. And even in the rare cases when management did take swift action, the targets weren’t always the people you’d expect. In 2011, Mike Harris, a contract hire then in his late 50s, was training a 40-year-old river ranger named Chelly Kearney to operate a new boat. She said that he directed her to pull to the shore, away from their group, and announced that he was going to take a bath. Then, she said, he removed all of his clothes and invited Kearney to join him in the water. When Kearney asked if they could leave, he put on his life jacket and climbed back on the boat naked. He “stood there with his penis completely exposed,” Kearney later wrote in a detailed letter to park leadership. “I stated to Harris, 'Do not get on this boat until you put your clothes on.' He stated to me that he needed to dry his clothes out. I said, 'No, do not get on this boat without your clothes.' He finally put on a pair of long underwear pants." Harris confirmed to me that he climbed onto the front of the boat naked: “I just wanted to sit in the sun and dry out,” he said. However, he said he thought he had permission from Kearney to bathe and didn’t ask her to join him. Upon Kearney’s return, she said she told a supervisor about the incident. The supervisor, she alleged, joked that they “used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.” Kearney didn’t take the matter further. The next year, on another trip, a biologist I’ll call Lynn said Harris repeatedly asked her to sleep in his tent when hers started leaking during a rainstorm. After she refused, he set up his tent directly next to hers. Harris told me that he only asked Lynn to join him in his tent once, and hadn’t meant the invitation as a come-on. “It wasn’t to have sex,” Harris said. “I think I said something like ‘We could snuggle and that’s all.’” Lynn said she emailed her supervisor about the episode. After a third female employee filed an EEO complaint about his behavior in 2013, Harris resigned. Lynn’s complaint was supposed to be confidential, but she noticed that boatmen she’d been friendly with began to act coldly toward her. And matters only escalated from there. > The supervisor, Kearney alleged, joked that they “used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.” In February 2014, Dave Loeffler led a joint Park Service-private sector trip. Both Anne and Lynn were apprehensive about being on the river with him. At one point, Lynn said, a passenger inquired about a boatman who’d been let go and Loeffler ranted about “complainers” who had ruined boatmen’s lives. The following day, as the group approached a campsite, Lynn was standing in the bow of her boat when Loeffler pulled her out roughly by her life jacket—a shocking breach of river norms. Anne came up to Lynn on the beach to find her concealing tears behind her sunglasses. Lynn wanted to leave, but at that point there was no way for her to hike out. On the last night, the party celebrated with dinner and drinks. A woman who worked for a private boat company produced a novelty penis-shaped straw she’d received at a bachelorette party and dropped it in a colleague’s drink. People laughed and passed the straw around. At one point, Lynn was holding it when Loeffler tried to take her picture. Then, someone put on music. It was an eclectic playlist, and people danced accordingly: interpretive dance, head-banging, two-stepping. A hip-hop song came on, and the group started talking about twerking. Lynn gave a comically awkward demonstration in her heavy canvas Carhartt pants, puffy down jacket and rubber boots. Two days later, Anne and Lynn were called into the offices of upper management and informed that they’d been accused of sexual misconduct. In written statements, Loeffler and two of his friends claimed that Anne and Lynn had shoved the penis straw in Loeffler’s face, danced provocatively in short skirts, and, as one complainant put it, behaved “coquettishly” throughout the trip. "I felt I needed to remove myself from this increasingly hostile work environment," Loeffler wrote in his statement. “They were being so rude and inappropriate to myself and others.” According to notes from the manager assigned to look into the situation, Loeffler said he wanted Anne and Lynn to be “treated similarly” to other employees accused of harassment—that is, with the Park Service deciding not to renew their contracts. Both women protested to the managers that they were being retaliated against for their previous reports of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, the park launched an investigation, although both Superintendent David Uberuaga and Deputy Superintendent Diane Chalfant would later acknowledge in an official report that it may not have been thorough enough. In particular, the investigators weren’t made aware of the history between Anne, Lynn and the boatmen. In a meeting, Lynn said Chalfant told her that Loeffler’s charges couldn’t be retaliatory, since Lynn’s previous sexual harassment complaint was confidential. Both Lynn and Anne were informed that their contracts would not be renewed. In Lynn’s termination letter, Chalfant wrote, “We cannot afford to have team members in our employment who are not on board with management’s expectations and requirements.” “What happened to [Lynn] was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen,” said Chelly Kearney, who had made her own efforts to draw attention to the treatment of women on the river. About a year after she resigned in 2012, she wrote a 29-page letter to Grand Canyon Chief Ranger Bill Wright documenting multiple instances of harassment, assault and retaliation and describing a culture that protected male harassers while allowing victims to be targeted for retaliation. The Park Service requested a formal EEO investigation, but the final report was never distributed beyond the uppermost level of park management and no disciplinary actions were taken. Following Lynn and Anne’s dismissals, Kearney tried again. She forwarded her letter to Uberuaga, writing that she had witnessed a “disturbing and pervasive level of hatred” toward Anne and her boss and that Anne should be protected by federal whistle-blower laws. She received a brief response from Uberuaga thanking her for her concern.  Denice Rice  Cheyenne Szydlo  Alicia Dabney Some former park employees now ruefully refer to the fateful party as “The Night on Cock-Straw Beach,” and the incident became an unlikely rallying point. Hall sent around an email asking a core group of former park employees and colleagues in private rafting companies to gather names of other women who’d been harassed or run out of the River District. With Donnelly’s help, 12 women and Hall wrote to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, requesting a formal investigation into the “pervasive culture of discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment” in the River District. Where Donnelly had tried for decades to get federal authorities to intervene more decisively in the Forest Service, the DOI responded quickly. In October, its Office of Inspector General launched an investigation that grew from the 13 initial complainants to include multiple interviews with more than 80 people. Their final report would identify 22 additional victims or witnesses. It included accounts of Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip with Loeffler, the Halloween party where Edwards took the photo up Anne’s skirt, the twerking incident that led to the complaint against Anne and Lynn, and several allegations involving a boatman that a former employee identified as Mike Harris. The women’s complaints, the investigators said, were “extremely credible.” The investigators also determined that Chalfant, the deputy superintendent, had allowed the complaint letter signed by the 12 women and Hall to make its way to some of the accused boatmen, in violation of policy. In an interview, the lead investigator, Greg Gransback, criticized the park’s handling of the accusations against Anne and Lynn. “If you compare what had happened to these two in the past and what they were accused of, I mean there’s just no comparison. It’s apples and oranges,” he said. “The park got it wrong where they went overboard.” In a February response to the investigation, the Park Service’s Intermountain Region didn’t contest any of the details in the report, and admitted that, in many instances, appropriate action hadn’t been taken. In the OIG report two boatmen whose actions are clearly consistent with those of Loeffler and Desrosiers deny all allegations made against them. (I was unable to reach Desrosiers directly despite contacting the Park Service, former colleagues, and two family members.) Boatman 3—whom a former employee identified as Loeffler—told the OIG that he “acknowledged making sexual remarks to women, but said that he did so only when he sensed a ‘mutual attraction.’” James Doyle, the communications chief for the Intermountain Region, said he couldn’t discuss individual allegations against employees and added, “We maintain a zero tolerance for sexual harassment and hostile workplace environment.” During the year and a half that the investigation was underway, the park made some changes. After Bill Wright transferred out of the district, his role was filled by a woman. The policy for staff boat trips was revised. There would be no alcohol permitted and an outside supervisor would be required on all expeditions. Dave Desrosiers retired in May 2015. According to its response to the OIG, the Park is introducing a detailed plan to improve its sexual harassment policies, and considering disciplinary action against managers who mishandled complaints. All employees are now required to wear “standard uniforms” on river trips. The OIG team was more than familiar with sexual harassment cases: Gransback had worked on the inquiry that resulted from the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal, when 12 Army officers were charged with assaulting female trainees. Still, Gransback told me that even he and his seasoned colleagues teared up when they heard Grand Canyon women describe the fine line they had to walk to do their jobs, “between not being hated and not being desired.” In the Tailhook case, he noted, the accused military members had developed a “Top Gun” mentality, believing they were too important to be taken down. He observed the same dynamic at work among the boatmen. “They became almost untouchable,” he said. But the military, Gransback pointed out, has made “drastic changes,” including evidence-based sexual harassment and assault prevention programs. So far, neither the Park or Forest Service has proposed anything so extensive. (Since June 2015, the Forest Service’s California region has strengthened its protocols for sexual harassment training and reporting, a spokesperson said.) In my conversations with the women, they expressed great pride in their strength. For years, they had performed dangerous, physically demanding jobs. Many of them had faced life-threatening situations. All of them had operated within environments in which women had very little room for error. The harassment they described had not only brought about personal humiliation or the loss of a job or even a career. It had shaken their entire perception of themselves—as tough and resilient, able to handle anything that man or nature could throw at them. They lost other things, too. After her boat trip with Loeffler, Cheyenne Syzdlo found herself avoiding the river. “When I’d hear people talk about how much they loved river trips, I’d be like, ‘Oh God, I hated them, I hated them,’” she told me. Then, in the course of our conversations, she came across an email she’d written to a friend after her second time in the Grand Canyon, before she’d ever met Dave Loeffler. In her message, Syzdlo described the thrill of riding huge rapids in the bow of an inflatable boat. She remembered how even the most experienced guides would pause and become tense, studying the water before steering them in. She recalled the night her group camped on a sliver of beach when a thunderstorm suddenly erupted, sending loose boulders tumbling down the sheer cliff face. She and her colleagues had huddled in their tents and contemplated the possibility that they might die, and then, when the morning dawned damp and bright, laughed as they fished their supplies out of the river. “I’d never thought about that second trip again because the third trip did change everything. It was magical,” she told me. “It’s so primitive and you feel so free. You never experience that in life.” She’d forgotten about it for nearly a decade, but that morning on the river, she hadn’t wanted to leave.

For a long time, the way philanthropy worked was simple: Rich people gave their money to museums and churches and opera houses and Harvard. Their names went up on buildings, charities gave them made-up awards, their grandkids went to rehab, the Earth went around the sun. But philanthropy is changing. Today's billionaires are less interested in legacy institutions, less obsessed with prestige and perpetuity. Part of this is a function of their age: In 2012, 4 percent of America’s biggest charitable donations were made by people under 50 years old. In 2014, a quarter of them were. The other factor driving the new philanthropists is how they earned their money in the first place. Last year, six of the 10 largest charitable donations in the United States came from the tech sector, solidifying Silicon Valley’s place as the epicenter of the newer, bigger, disrupty-er philanthropy. There, tech billionaires form “giving circles” to share leads on promising charities, and they hire the same consultants to vet them. They use terms like “hacker philanthropy” and “effective altruism.” These guys—they are mostly guys—believe that they became successful businessmen by upending existing institutions, by scaling simple ideas, by "breaking shit." And, with few exceptions, that is how they plan to become successful philanthropists, too. All of this became much more relevant in December, when Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they were giving 99 percent of their wealth to charity. The total amount they pledged, around $45 billion in Facebook shares at current valuation, exceeds the endowments of the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations combined. If Zuckerberg gives away the upper limit of what he announced in December, $1 billion per year for the next three years, he will likely become the world’s second-largest charitable donor after Bill Gates. He is 31 years old. Zuckerberg’s ability to remake the world in his own image, in his own lifetime, is unprecedented. Andrew Carnegie opened his first library when he was 68, and only managed to get around $5 billion in today’s dollars out the door before he died. John D. Rockefeller, generally considered the most generous industrialist in history, launched his foundation when he was 76, and only gave away around half his fortune. If he wanted to, Zuckerberg could eradicate polio, or de-neglect half a dozen tropical diseases, or fix all the water pipes in Flint, or give $9,000 to every single one of the world's refugees. But $45 billion, as a former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee put it, is "a 1,000-pound gorilla." You don't give away that much money without changing the places and institutions and people you give it to, sometimes for the worse. Zuckerberg should already know this. In 2010, he donated $100 million to the Newark Public Schools on a promise from Cory Booker that he could, according to Dale Russakoff's _The Prize_, "flip a whole city." Zuckerberg rode into Newark with the suddenness of a software update. He was determined to end the stalemate between the teachers’ union and the district, establish dozens of new charter schools and close down failing public ones. Oh, and establish a model that could be replicated in urban school districts all over the country. All in just five years. Needless to say, it didn't happen. Up to $20 million of the donation went to consultants, scrappy little MBAs charging $1,000 a day to develop, among other things, an algorithm that assigned thousands of children to new schools. And nobody bothered to ask parents or teachers whether they wanted to be flipped, causing a ton of resentment that ultimately slowed everything down. By 2015, Zuckerberg was touting Newark's charter schools, with 14,000 students, as a success. Meanwhile, its public schools, with 35,000 students, were announcing a budget deficit of $65 million and layoffs of up to 30 percent of their staff. As Antony Bugg-Levine, the CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, told me, the hard part about social change “is that it doesn’t scale like a social network.” I’ve spent the last few months talking to more than 40 researchers, development practitioners, foundation employees and other Silicon Valley philanthropists, asking them about the difficult business of giving money away. They told me about their own Newarks: Promising ideas scaled into oblivion, donations that disappeared into corrupt governments, groupthink disguised as insight. But they also told me about projects that worked, that scaled, that matched the ambitions of the new philanthropy while avoiding its blind spots. And it turns out that some of the best ideas are the ones Zuckerberg is the least likely to hear in Silicon Valley. # Don’t Be Seduced By Technology Since December I've been studying Zuckerberg’s Facebook posts like a Talmudic scholar, looking for hints of what he's interested in, trying to figure out the investments and bets and mistakes he's going to make. So far he’s light on specifics, mostly speaking in gushy bromides about "connecting people" and "building strong communities." But if there is one clear, undeniable, overriding theme that emerges, it is this: Zuckerberg believes in the power of technology to transform the world. "We must build technology to make change," he wrote last fall. "Many institutions invest money in these challenges, but most progress comes from productivity gains through innovation." He's not wrong. Nearly every social advance in history has technology somewhere near the center of it—the aqueduct, the steam train, the birth control pill. And whenever you start asking people about the life-altering potential of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the tech-based philanthropy he represents, the first words you're likely to hear are “The Green Revolution.” In 1975, nearly three out of five people in Asia lived on less than $1 a day. Rains at the wrong time of year meant the difference between starvation and survival. Then, researchers funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations created new crops—varieties that grew taller, needed less water and could be planted year-round. Over the next 30 years, this innovation radically improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Rice yields spiked by 1,000 percent. Wheat got cheaper, healthier and more abundant. Norman Borlaug, the scientist who developed the new wheat varieties, won the Nobel Prize. It's understandable to be seduced by this story. America spent more than 100 years going from a poor agrarian society to a rich urban one. Technology, the development agencies and the foundations tell you, has the potential to "leapfrog" this process for the next batch of countries, to boost poor communities into the middle class without all the messy slave labor and cholera we went through on the way. But as Kentaro Toyama, a former Gates Foundation consultant and the author of _Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology_, points out, it’s not the _development_ of technology that leads to social change, but the _application_ of it. The Green Revolution, he says, wasn't just a case of "new crops, big changes." At the same time the farmers were planting the higher-yield crops, governments were dramatically reforming their agricultural policies. Between 1972 and 1990, Asian countries nearly tripled their investments in agriculture. They provided subsidized loans for farmers to buy fertilizer, trained them in how to plant the new crops and built roads and canals to get their produce to markets. In 1970, only 12 percent of the agricultural land in Bangladesh was irrigated. By 1995, 38 percent of it was. "Technology," Toyama says, "is the easiest part of any solution." The hard part is everything that comes afterward. Take car crashes, which kill more people every year than tuberculosis or pulmonary disease. The technology to prevent these deaths—seat belts, motorcycle helmets—is not rocket science. It's just that no one has figured out how to make it appeal to the people who need it, especially in the developing world, where 90 percent of these deaths occur. Sometimes technological solutions aren't up against indifference, but outright resistance. In the ’80s, a global health NGO called PATH got a grant to develop Uniject, a pre-filled, single-use syringe designed for midwives or birth attendants to inject patients in their homes. The syringe was ready in the mid-1990s, but more than 15 years later, it had only been rolled out in one developing country. The others had laws that prohibited anyone but doctors from giving injections. "Lots of new technologies require policy changes to be effective," says Michael Free, the former director of product development for PATH. "Getting buy-in for that takes a lot longer." All these snags, though, are too complicated for the clean "leapfrogging" narrative you hear from the techno-utopians—and from Zuckerberg himself. "A few months ago I learned about a farmer in Maharashtra called Ganesh," Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed in the Times of India in December. "Last year Ganesh started using Free Basics [Facebook's no-cost Internet service for developing countries]. He found weather information to prepare for monsoon season. He looked up commodity prices to get better deals. Now Ganesh is investing in new crops and livestock." This, too, is tempting to swallow whole. If farmers knew the prices they'd get for their produce, they could choose the market offering the highest price, or plant more profitable crops in the first place. Entire communities could be changed by the simple injection of information. The only published evidence of this effect in the real world, though, is a 2007 study that showed fishermen in Kerala, India, checking prices for their fish before deciding which port to sell them to. These fishermen sell a perishable good. They have to sell it to someone, they have to sell it today and it's the same distance back to the shore regardless of which port they pick. But the typical African or Indian farmer does not live perfectly equidistant from several produce markets. One might take an hour to get to, the other 10. And when farmers in developing countries buy seeds, they are not comparison-shopping between dozens of stores. They have just a few options, and often have to go through village middlemen or loan sharks. "Even when you have the information," Toyama says, "you're not in a situation where you can get any benefit from it." Also, when “leapfrogging” happens, it can be less of a jump and more of a step. The Kerala study, which sounds so transformative, only boosted incomes for fishermen by around 8 percent, and reduced the price of fish for consumers by 4 percent. It didn’t turn poor fishermen into white-collar workers, and it didn’t give a broad swath of the population access to more nutritious food. And guess what? That's fine! If there's one piece of advice that emerges from the last 50 years of the tech-for-the-poor hope and disappointment cycle, it is this: _Chase the 8 percents_. Zuckerberg has interest and expertise in technology, and there's nothing inherently wrong with making bets on gadgets or innovations that have the potential to help the poor. But as he does so, he should acknowledge that the silver-bullet promise of technology only works at changing the world when it's combined with political will and popular demand. Until he finds a way to engineer those (please don't), he should focus on the small ways, at the margins, where technology can improve people's lives, 8 percent at a time. # $45 Billion Isn't That Much Money In 2001, the Gates Foundation gave PATH and the World Health Organization $70 million, 10 years and a simple objective: Develop a vaccine for meningitis A and make it affordable for every single person who needs it. At the time, meningitis A was concentrated in one part of the world, a stripe across the middle of sub-Saharan Africa known as the "meningitis belt." The disease mostly affected children, causing them to die or become paralyzed in minutes. The yearly outbreaks were predictable. Where they would happen, and how severely, were not. Eventually, PATH developed a vaccine that gave patients 15 years of immunity. At a cost of around 50 cents a dose, public health departments in every country in the meningitis belt could afford to procure it at scale. By 2013, less than a decade after an outbreak killed 25,000 people, the meningitis belt had just four reported cases. Marc LaForce headed the team in charge of bringing the vaccine to market. He says it wasn't just the scale of the Gates donation that mattered, but its duration. In those days, most grants were capped at two or three years, with check-ins every six months. Years of work could be wiped away if a donor decided progress was moving too slowly and pulled out. "If you want to do something major," LaForce says, "you need the ability to go two steps forward, then one step back." Plus, the Gates team left LaForce alone. Back then, the foundation only employed about a dozen people who worked out of a small office in a residential neighborhood of Seattle. Staffers spent their time making lists of diseases, ranking them by annual fatalities, then calling around to find out which ones were closest to being cured. “We didn’t need to be specialists,” says Gordon Perkin, the foundation’s first director of global health. “We just needed to know which organizations had the judgment and the infrastructure, and we gave them money.” This story doesn't just illustrate the potential of philanthropy. It also demonstrates that how Zuckerberg gives away his money will be just as important as what he gives it to. Because one way to look at his $45 billion is that it's a lot of money. Another way to look at it is that it's about what the United States spends on prisons every six months. Or education every four weeks. Or health care every five days. Even at a scale that large, efficiency matters. It’s shocking just how unusual that early Gates grant was. Most legacy foundations pay consultants millions of dollars to study and re-study problems before they give grants toward solving them. The Ford Foundation spends nearly $1 for every $4 it gives away. In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation’s largest grant recipient (other than its offshoot, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), was Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm. “All the work was to provide advice on internal decision-making,” a former Rockefeller employee told me. “To make it seem charitable we'd ask them to write a blog on our website, and that would frequently be the only public or charitable thing to come out of these multimillion-dollar so-called grants.” (In a statement, the Rockefeller Foundation defended its approach, saying that it “has developed a rigorous model on how to determine the problems we support, and ultimately the solutions that we believe will create the most impact.”) The Gates Foundation, as it's expanded to more than 1,300 employees, has become prone to the same bloat, the same "expert-itis," as a former grantee calls it. "They hired Ph.D.s in biotech and all they wanted to do was the science that the grantees were doing." As the staff proliferated, so did the conditions on the donations. The foundation started requiring grantees to keep track of baggage fees and told them they couldn't buy laptops or let their overhead go above 15 percent. "Grant approval processes went from 48 hours to 48 months," the former grantee told me. (The Gates Foundation responded, too: “While each grant agreement is unique, we have policies in place to help ensure that our funds are spent as effectively as possible.") It’s hard to overstate just how un-Silicon Valley all of this is. "Money is sitting there to make the world a better place, and to dole it out cautiously is antithetical to why it’s there," says Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, a foundation set up by Mitch Kapor, an early investor in Uber and other unicorns. I heard similar arguments from almost all the tech people I talked to: Zuckerberg shouldn't be afraid to fail; he should approach philanthropy like a venture capitalist, testing out ideas to scale up later on. Bypassing legacy institutions is what Silicon Valley CEOs are good at, right? All those consultants must strike them as the charity equivalent of taxi medallions. Still, running a charity does require fully understanding problems before you try to solve them. "Move fast and break things" is a fine mentality for Facebook, where the consequences of a few bad lines of code are mostly limited to a drop in revenue or an exodus of users to Snapchat. Applying the same philosophy to health or education or criminal justice has consequences that can't be shrugged away. In the 1990s, Western donors' emphasis on HIV/AIDS in Africa resulted in chronic under-funding of less-visible conditions like pneumonia, anemia and diarrhea. Zuckerberg's donation in Newark resulted in public schools being closed and some kids having to walk through rough neighborhoods to charter schools far from their homes. And it’s this neglected zone, somewhere between bloat and "break things," where Zuckerberg has the opportunity to do something quietly, unsexily awesome. The U.S. has more than 85,000 foundations and 1.5 million charities. Most major charitable causes, things like curing cancer, regularizing immigration and providing early education, are already covered by dozens of capable—and overlapping—organizations. In its annual survey of philanthropists, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations reported that 80 percent of donors wanted to see more collaboration between their grantees. But only 13 percent were willing to consistently pay for it. The need for coordination is obvious when you look at the scale of the problems that philanthropists want to solve. Again, studying Gates’ early years is instructive. When he decided he wanted to vaccinate hundreds of millions of African kids, he didn't set up an organization that would replace WHO or UNICEF or all the other agencies already handing out vaccines. Instead, he founded something called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—a funding pipeline designed to help those agencies work more effectively. Gavi pays pharmaceutical companies to research tropical diseases, it issues "vaccine bonds" so poor countries can buy millions of treatments on layaway, it orders medications in such bulk that the cost comes down to pennies. In short, it connects a network of actors who have similar interests—something Zuckerberg knows a thing or two about. So if he really wants to leverage the limited funding he has, Zuckerberg shouldn't think of himself as a venture capitalist. He should think of himself as a mutual fund manager. Find promising organizations, perform due diligence, link them to a portfolio of other agencies doing good work—then give them money and _get out of their way_. Or, as Patricia Stonesifer, the current CEO of Martha's Table and the former CEO of the Gates Foundation, puts it, “Don’t expect to be the only solution out there.” # Capitalism: The Cause of, and Solution to, All of Life’s Problems What Zuckerberg actually announced last December wasn't a big fat donation to charity. All he did was establish a limited liability company (LLC) and issue a promise that he would use it for good. Much of the reaction at the time was suspicious, speculating that an LLC was a scheme for Zuckerberg to avoid taxes (which isn't true) or that it would allow him to spend mountains of money without disclosing how he was doing so (which is). But the corporate approach actually makes a lot of sense. Under the standard philanthropic model, billionaires set up a foundation and give it a huge endowment. Every year, the foundation has to give away at least 5 percent of its total value. Meanwhile, the other 95 percent gets invested in blue chip stocks, hedge funds, foreign currencies, whatever will keep the total endowment the same size. That's how foundations like Rockefeller and Ford exist in perpetuity: Do-gooders work on one side of the building finding things to donate to, while bankers work on the other side, making sure there's more to donate next year. Recently, though, donors have started to reject this model. Giving away a trickle of money each year is unlikely to live up to the verbs—_transform, reimagine, revolutionize_—the new philanthropists use to describe their goals. Besides, why should 95 percent of your money just sit there in hedge funds and Halliburton stock, especially if you think you can do just as much good with the money you invest as the money you give away? "This idea that philanthropy is only about nonprofits is an outdated model," says Paula Goldman, a vice president at the Omidyar Network. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, was one of the most prominent tech billionaires to merge his investing and grant-making. The foundation still gives donations, but the LLC provides loans and seed capital and invests in things like solar-powered lighting startups, Brazilian test-prep companies and funds that discover Indian entrepreneurs. Zuckerberg is going even further, giving up on a foundation entirely and putting all of his charity money in a corporate form with no limits on how to spend it. He’s not interested in making his money back. He just wants the flexibility to fund charities or companies or both. Which explains why one of Zuckerberg’s most recent donations wasn’t a donation at all. It was $10 million in seed capital for an education startup called Bridge International Academies, a chain of private elementary schools that wants to deliver education to the world's poorest students. Bridge’s model, which has only been rolled out in Kenya so far, is based on standardization and accountability. Teachers get a centralized curriculum from Bridge experts, then deliver it to kids from an e-reader. Students—and teachers—are tracked in real time, principals notified of everything from attendance rates to busted pipes. The latest class of Bridge students just took their exams. Sixty percent passed, compared to the national average of 49 percent. > It's tempting to say capitalism perverts philanthropy, full stop, and advise Zuckerberg to go back and form a foundation. But that's not right either. The primary appeal of Bridge, especially to investors like Zuckerberg, is the $6 per month it says it charges its students. Operating as a business rather than a charity gives each school an incentive to deliver a decent education and ensures that it’s not going to wither away when development agencies or donors move on to the next idea. But the problem with dispatching private companies to supply basic services is that they replace the public systems already tasked with providing them. Last year, 116 African NGOs signed an open letter to Bridge International Academies and the World Bank, pointing out that $6 per month is in fact a lot of money for a lot of Kenyans. Bridge schools charge extra for uniforms and lunch. Its teachers earn around $90 per month, teaching classes as large as 70 students. Those pass rates 11 percent higher than the national average are great, but the letter also noted that Bridge, with 400 schools, has attracted more than $100 million in international investment. Meanwhile, Kenya's public system, with almost 20,000 schools, has gotten just $88 million. Lucy Bradlow, Bridge's global director of public relations, counters that the majority of Kenyan kids already attend private schools, many of which cost even more than Bridge and provide even less. In public schools, teacher absentee rates are so high that the average kid only gets two hours of instruction per day. She’s right: Bridge is a little bit better than what's already there. But the troubling part about the company isn't the service it provides now, but the one it wants to provide later. Bridge sees itself as a “model,” one that its backers believe can be spread across the entire developing world. It plans to be profitable once it serves 500,000 students. Eventually, it hopes to reach 10 million. Bridge's own marketing materials describe it as “a scalable Academy-in-a-Box solution.” But the history of philanthropy is littered with projects that helped the poor at a small scale, then made them worse off at a larger one. Microfinance started out small, too. The early trials were non-profit, and revenues were invested back into services that would help borrowers pay back their loans. Then, in the late 2000s, responding to donor pressure to be “sustainable,” microlending went private. Citibank, Barclays and Deutsche Bank established microfinance divisions. In 2007, one of the largest microlending banks, Mexico’s Compartamos Banco, even had an IPO, its executives earning millions loaning out money to women and poor farmers and charging interest rates as high as 195 percent. Since most loans were capped at a few hundred dollars, borrowers could only get enough money to set up informal businesses, stuff like selling fruit on the side of the road or giving rides on a scooter. As microloans flooded the market, small-scale services flooded entire economies. In Bangladesh, nearly 25 percent of the population took out a microloan. In Mexico, Compartamos’ customers were taking out new microloans to pay back the ones they already had. By scaling up too fast, microfinance ended up trapping people in the exact cycle—informal work, bottomless debt, low productivity—from which it was designed to free them. ## How Microfinance Traps the Poor ### *As illustrated by someone we’ll call Joey  It's tempting to stop there, to say capitalism perverts philanthropy, full stop, and advise Zuckerberg to just go back and form a foundation. But that's not right either. One of the most successful private-sector development projects of the last 10 years is M-PESA, the mobile-money system that allows people in Kenya to transfer money via their cell phones. Before the system launched, Kenyans sent money to each other by mail, or by giving envelopes full of cash to bus drivers. Replacing an inefficient, expensive system with a regularized one made everybody better off. That's not as easy to argue, in the long run, about education. So, when Zuckerberg hears pitches from companies seeking to solve the world's problems, he shouldn't ask them if they have a plan to grow, or an ambition to exist in perpetuity. He should ask himself whether he really wants them to replace the systems that already exist, or simply make them better. Because successful companies don't just disrupt other companies—they disrupt economies, governments and the people who depend on them. That's not something that Zuckerberg ever had to worry about, but he has to start. # Go Beyond Giving Directly In 2009, four grad students came up with an audacious idea: Instead of giving poor people the things we think they need—bags of food, stacks of clothing, a pair of goats—what if we gave them enough money to decide for themselves? They called their charity GiveDirectly, and in 2011 they started doing exactly that. They went to villages in Kenya, found the poorest people living there and transferred $1,000 straight to their cell phones. Later, they came back to ask the villagers what they did with the money. Mostly, it turns out, the villagers spent it on better roofs, better food, paying off debts, starting up businesses. All the stuff the development system used to buy for them—but without any overhead. At first, no one wanted to fund an idea this outlandish. But then, GiveDirectly went to Silicon Valley. Google got in early, awarding the charity its Global Impact Award and dispatching the head of Google.org to sit on GiveDirectly’s board. Since then, GiveDirectly has grown like a Y Combinator startup, its budget ballooning from $700,000 in 2012 to $17.4 million in 2014. In 2013, Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, hosted a coming-out party for the charity with the heads of Dropbox and General Catalyst Partners. Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg's other Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, just handed GiveDirectly $25 million. At five years old, GiveDirectly is the most buzzed-about charity in Silicon Valley. What all this hype ignores, though, is that GiveDirectly's audacious idea has been around for decades. Post-disaster charities have been experimenting with cash transfers since the 1990s. In 2010, when floods deluged one-third of Pakistan, aid workers handed out 1.7 million debit cards pre-loaded with $230. As early as the 1980s, Latin American countries were handing out "conditional" cash grants, paying parents to send their kids to school or feed them balanced meals. Even the World Bank, not exactly a laboratory of revolutionary thinking, has poured more than $25 billion into "social safety nets"—unemployment and pension benefits, basically—in developing countries. "Welfare" sounds a lot less “break shit” than transferring money to people via their cell phones, but it is, sorry everybody, the same thing. And that's exactly why Zuckerberg should be excited about giving money directly to poor people: Not because it is a new and revolutionary idea, but because it is an old and effective one—that’s only fulfilling a fraction of its potential. The challenge with direct cash payments, says Owen Barder, the director of Europe for the Center for Global Development, is getting them to all of the people who need them. The places where this strategy has worked well already had functioning banking sectors and national identification systems in place before a disaster struck. In Pakistan, humanitarian agencies used government data to identify the areas with the worst damage, then checked IDs to make sure the debit cards got to the people living there. Most poor countries, though, don't have these pipes laid down. Kenya's Hunger Safety Nets program, which gives cash to people at risk of starvation, took months to establish because payouts were distributed through local agents, whom people didn't trust, or ATMs, which people had never used before. Barder describes a scenario where, 10 minutes after an earthquake hits Nepal, all the people within five miles of the epicenter get $500 on their cell phones. That's a great idea. But it is, he says, a lot harder than it sounds. After the 2005 tsunami, low-caste populations in India were almost entirely excluded from cash transfers because they weren't registered in the national welfare system. In Indonesia, cash transfers were distributed through community leaders who had to come to a central planning center, then travel back to their constituencies with an envelope full of cash. In at least one case, bandits were waiting for them on the bus. The need for modernizing these systems is obvious. In 2009, India launched an ambitious—and largely unheralded—project to issue a 12-digit identification number to all 1.3 billion of its citizens. So far, it has spent around $880 million and registered 970 million people. The numbers are already being used to distribute unemployment checks and disaster relief. But as this effort moves to more remote populations, registering them gets harder. Some farmers have hands so worn the scanners can’t read their fingerprints. Laying down the pipes to get cash transfers to the first 75 percent of a population, the people who have birth certificates and cell phones, is relatively easy. Getting to the last 25 percent, the people one charity could never reach, is technical, slow, expensive and absolutely critical—a perfect project for Zuckerberg. These aren't, of course, the only ideas I heard for how Zuckerberg should give away his money. Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development says Zuckerberg should invest in global public goods, things no single government wants to pay for but the world needs nonetheless—like a vaccine for malaria, or making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. Hauke Hillebrandt of the Centre For Effective Altruism says Zuckerberg should prevent "global public bads" like international pandemics or aggressive artificial intelligence—Skynet, basically. In the end, though, Zuckerberg’s greatest impact might be in the model he sets for other philanthropists. The Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth to charity, has attracted more than 142 commitments totaling more than $400 billion. The Founders Pledge has convinced 151 startup executives—most of them [look about 19](http://thefounderspledge.org/members/)—to devote a portion of their exits to philanthropy. Charitable giving in the United States has nearly quintupled since 1994, and shows no signs of reverting back to opera houses and Harvard. Zuckerberg’s money alone is not enough to change the world, but his influence on this generation of givers might be enough to change philanthropy. If he’s successful, he’ll show them the value of going slowly. He'll hire people who come from the places he is trying to save and who have been affected by the problems he's trying to solve. He will ignore NGOs that promise to "flip" anything, and he will distrust anyone whose Twitter bio includes the words “thought leader.” If Zuckerberg really wants to get ambitious, he should challenge the Silicon Valley notion that giving money away is an activity unrelated to how it is earned. Last year, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, started allowing users to add a $5 donation to their ride for No Kid Hungry. In the UK, the company urged riders to donate old clothes to Save the Children. Kalanick would have a better impact on the planet if he stopped asking us for our clothes and, instead, started allowing his workers to unionize. Similarly, one of Zuckerberg's values for his philanthropy is “empowering communities.” He does the opposite when Facebook turns its data over to dictators. Now that the Giving Pledge is off and running, why not establish a Stop Routing Your Profits Through Tax Havens Pledge? I know, I know, he's running a public company. Shareholder pressure, quarterly returns, impact on innovation, blah blah blah. But perhaps Zuckerberg should ask himself why it is impossible, as a CEO, to apply the same values he aims to embody as a philanthropist. If he really wants to change the world, Zuckerberg can start by changing his own.

Seven Days on the Trail with Kevin Baker and Jack Hitt.

When Donald Trump launched his bid for the White House, one of his earliest initiatives was a promise to help Americans who had gone to war for their country. Or, as his campaign put it, to take care of “all Veteran complaints very quickly and efficiently like a world-class business man can do, but a politician has no clue.” Last summer, about a month after declaring his candidacy, Trump unveiled a hotline for veterans to share ideas about how to overhaul the bureaucracy that served them. A campaign aide said that Trump himself would personally respond to some of the messages. “I love all veterans and will help them finally lead the kind of lives that they should be leading,” Trump declared at the time. Many of the veterans who called the hotline—855-VETS-352—say they were sent to an automated voicemail message telling them to email the campaign. Those who reached a live human were similarly instructed to send an email, or to mail their medical records to campaign headquarters at Trump Tower. It soon became evident that Trump had no actual plan in place to help anyone who contacted him through the hotline. Calling it a “publicity stunt,” one veteran wrote on PopularMilitary.com, “We are not sure what the estimated wait time is, but it is probably safe to say you should hold on to your [Veterans Affairs] card for now.” This perfunctory effort was perhaps to be expected, since Trump has a long and colorful history of showing disrespect toward men and women in uniform. He did not serve himself, avoiding the Vietnam War via four education deferments, followed by a medical deferment for bone spurs in his feet. (His campaign notes that Trump received a high number in the draft lottery and was unlikely to ever be called up.) But on numerous occasions, he has dismissed the experiences of those who did. In the 2015 biography _Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success_, Trump is quoted as saying, “I always thought I was in the military” because of his time at the New York Military Academy, an expensive boarding school 60 miles north of New York City where Trump brought [women onto campus](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decades-later-disagreement-over-young-trumps-military-academy-post/2016/01/09/907a67b2-b3e0-11e5-a842-0feb51d1d124_story.html) so often that his yearbook nickname was “Ladies’ Man.” The author, Michael D’Antonio, writes that Trump believed the academy “provided him with more military training than most actual soldiers.”  "I'm really good at war," Trump recently claimed. Here he is as a student at the New York Military Academy. (Getty Images, © Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library.) In the 1990s, Trump made headlines for lobbying the New York State legislature to ban disabled veterans from working as street vendors around Trump Tower. “Do we allow Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s finest and most luxurious shopping districts, to be turned into an outdoor flea market, clogging and seriously downgrading the area?” he wrote to a state assemblyman. Thirteen years later, he appealed again to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Whether they are veterans or not,” he wrote, “[the vendors] should not be allowed to sell on this most important and prestigious shopping street.” At times, his remarks on veterans and military service have veered into outright mockery. In a 1997 interview with Howard Stern, Trump likened his determination to avoid sexually transmitted infections to serving in combat. His sex life in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam,” he said. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” Last summer, he declared that Senator John McCain—a former Navy pilot who was held prisoner for five and a half years and tortured by the North Vietnamese—was “not a war hero.” His reasoning: “I like people that weren’t captured.” Meanwhile, when Trump has weighed in on national security questions, his remarks often reveal either ignorance or disdain for military expertise and the codes of conduct that govern the armed forces. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me,” he boasted in one speech, adding, "I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war." His foreign policy prescriptions include proposals to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” to “take out” the families of ISIS members and to torture terrorism suspects. (“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would,” he told one crowd. “And you know what? If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing.”) When it was pointed out that soldiers couldn’t legally carry out those last two actions, Trump was unconcerned. "They're not going to refuse me. Believe me.” (He walked back that last statement the next day.) The Geneva Conventions, he recently observed, have made American soldiers “afraid to fight.” Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policy, combined with his years of broadsides, have set off a very real fear within military circles about what might happen were he to become president. In the last two months, I spoke with dozens of people in the national security realm—current and retired officers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA officials. The words they used to describe their mood: Terrified. Shocked. Appalled. Never before, they say, has a candidate gotten so close to the White House with such little respect for the military. > One former Marine infantry officer described Trump as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk.” “He completely misunderstands the military profession that he would head if he were the president,” said Robert Killebrew, a retired colonel who served in the Army for more than 30 years. Others were less polite. In a pair of ads produced by the American Future Fund, a retired Special Forces commander named Michael Waltz calls Trump a draft-dodger who “hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” and a Vietnam veteran, Tom Hanton, says that Trump’s quip about POWs was “the most infuriating comment I think I’ve heard from a politician in my entire life.” One former Marine infantry officer described Trump to me as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk” whose “knowledge of the Middle East could be trumped (sorry) by your average Georgetown sophomore.” Trump’s chosen foreign policy advisers—which include a 2009 college graduate who touted his experience in the Model U.N. on his online résumé and another who used Kanye West lyrics to make arguments on his foreign policy blog—have only stoked these anxieties. “Weirdo nobodies,” was how one military historian characterized them to me. “They’re probably the least qualified group of foreign policy and national security advisers I’ve ever seen or even heard of,” said Richard Kohn, an expert in civil-military relations and retired professor at the University of North Carolina. A source with firsthand knowledge told me that Trump’s campaign pursued retired General David Petraeus, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, but all three men declined. In a TV appearance not long afterward, Trump said he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the members of his military team if they didn’t agree with him. (Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) For even the savviest of presidents, the relationship between a commander in chief and his military is famously fraught, an intricate dance of egos and agendas, worldviews and bureaucracies. A President Trump, however, could usher in a clash of historic proportions. “If you take the man at his word,” said Michael Breen, the president of the Truman National Security Project and a decorated former Army officer, “we have a presidential candidate who seems to have committed himself to triggering what would probably be the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since the American Civil War.” One of the first tasks of a new president is finding the right people to surround himself with. His cabinet members are there to enact his agenda, and if they fail to do so, he can pressure them to resign or fire them. The president’s relationship with his military leaders is fundamentally different. While he gets to appoint both the secretary of defense as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the latter is an apolitical figure, not a partisan official. The incoming White House typically inherits the previous administration's chair of the Joint Chiefs (the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard and Marines) and combatant commanders. The president cannot control what his generals say to Congress. And while he technically has the power to remove three- and four-star generals from service, it’s far riskier to dismiss a general than a cabinet member gone rogue. “If a military official resigns, it’s a crisis in civil-military relations,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and former executive officer under Petraeus. “If a cabinet position does that, it’s just politics.” Probably the most famous example of such a crisis was when President Harry Truman canned Douglas MacArthur—and that didn’t end well for Truman. MacArthur was revered for his leadership in WWII. (One of his aides praised him as “the greatest man since Christ.”) But after Truman named the 70-year-old general the supreme commander of Allied forces in the Pacific during the Korean War, MacArthur started ignoring orders, withholding information about his operations, and publicly questioning Truman’s policy. So Truman removed him from his post, effectively ending his military career. It was a deeply unpopular decision. Letters poured into the administration demanding Truman’s impeachment and calling him “a Judas” and “the pig in the White House.” Meanwhile, when MacArthur returned to the United States he was greeted with parades and endless praise. The Senate held hearings on MacArthur’s dismissal, during which the general blasted his president’s foreign policy. Truman, who privately said MacArthur’s testimony was “a bunch of damn bullshit,” never recovered, and in March 1952, he announced he would not run for re-election. The military leadership’s independent nature gives it considerable power to fight back against a president it doesn’t like. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s, for instance, Colin Powell nearly derailed President Bill Clinton’s administration in its first year. The military brass was skeptical of Clinton long before he arrived at the White House. He was the first antiwar president, having avoided the Vietnam War and once writing of “loathing” the military. During the 1992 campaign, he’d pledged to rewrite the military’s laws to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly. Powell had no intention of letting this happen. The four-star general viewed the new president and his team as “children,” as diplomat Richard Holbrooke later recalled. Powell was a charming operator with an inspiring life story who had spent most of his nearly 35-year career in Washington and knew how to work the levers of power. (“You show me a general in Washington who ain’t political and I’ll show you a guy who ain’t going to get promoted again, and probably should not be a general in the first place,” he once said.) Shortly before Clinton’s inauguration, he told a class of Naval Academy midshipmen that if they found Clinton’s policy “completely unacceptable and it strikes to the heart of your moral beliefs, then I think you have to resign.” Five days after Clinton’s inauguration, Clinton met with Powell and the rest of the Joint Chiefs in the Roosevelt Room. “[Homosexuality] is a problem for us,” Powell informed the new president, according to a notetaker. One by one, the rest of the generals flatly opposed the president’s plan. Furthermore, as former White House aide George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, the Joint Chiefs had already lined up congressional support for their position: “Their message was clear: Keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight us, and you’ll lose—and it won’t be pretty.” And that’s essentially what happened. Powell did little to quash rumors that the entire Joint Chiefs would resign if Clinton went through with the policy. During the next nine months, the battle over the issue cost Clinton dearly. Eventually, he agreed to Powell’s proposed compromise, which we now know as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “The new president had been rolled,” wrote historian Matthew Moten in his book _Presidents and Their Generals._ The Bush administration, meanwhile, provided a disturbing preview of the damage that can be done when a civilian leadership pushes the armed services to adopt policies of dubious legality. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary, was regarded as uninterested in the military’s advice and dismissive of the Joint Chiefs. After September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—practices that exposed the U.S. to charges of violating the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act. The decision set off years of turmoil within the armed services. Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, who was by then secretary of state, said that there were numerous instances of individuals in the chain of command sitting on the order to introduce abusive—and, some thought, illegal—interrogation methods in December 2002. “There was never a collective agreement to do the things that Rumsfeld told people to do in that memo,” Wilkerson recently told me. “There were certain leaders that passed on and gave orders based on those documents, but there are lots and lots of people who walked away from it and refused to do it.” > Former CIA general counsel John Rizzo predicted an employee “exodus” if Trump became president and followed through on his proposals. Alberto Mora, the Navy's general counsel, memorably fought to ban any use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which he believed were torture. Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, similarly argued that allowing his agents to witness the acts described in Rumsfeld's order, let alone implement them, would be disastrous. "Either they'll watch the law being broken, or, as sworn law enforcement officers, seeing laws being broken, they may try to arrest the military interrogators,” he told his boss, CITF Commander Colonel Brittain Mallow, as recounted in ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan’s book, _The Black Banners_. “Nothing good can come of this." Retired military officers told me that the effect of this kind of internal dissension can be crippling. "You have usually an enormous decrease in morale because you sense that there's nothing you can do about it," Wilkerson told me. "Your values are being disrupted; you feel powerless." Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and military historian, said that "any policy that is inconsistently applied creates confusion and consternation in a hierarchical organization." On some occasions, the military has been able to use the tools at its disposal—the press, Congress, calculated leaks, endless bureaucratic maneuvering—to reshape a president’s entire policy. President Barack Obama, for instance, arrived in office determined to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he encountered two formidable opponents in Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, which coordinates military activities across the Middle East and Central Asia, and Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, who the new president had named the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s effort began with a 66-page classified review of the war effort that reached the opposite conclusion to the one favored by Obama. In McChrystal’s assessment, he argued that he needed at least 40,000 more troops in order to succeed in Afghanistan. Petraeus, the respected architect of the surge who was being talked about as a future presidential candidate, stumped for additional troops in the media. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, tacitly endorsed McChrystal’s plan in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then the classified McChrystal report was leaked to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. On September 21, 2009, the Post ran Woodward’s story on the front page: “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” The impact of this leak is hard to overstate. It essentially forced Obama to take ownership of the Afghan War—a move he and his aides had resisted. If he stuck with his preferred option, he would be contradicting a respected general in the field who was predicting near-apocalyptic consequences unless additional troops were dispatched. At a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, McChrystal was asked if a more modest approach could work. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy,” he said. Obama was furious, according to Woodward’s book _Obama’s Wars_, telling his aides: “We’ve got to stop this.” In the end, he couldn’t. In a December 1 speech at West Point, Obama ordered 30,000 new troops into Afghanistan. McChrystal could—and did—find another 10,000 soldiers from the ranks of the coalition forces, which meant he got his 40,000. The generals had won. In the many books by and about Trump, and in interviews given by his employees past and present, a clear picture emerges of his leadership style. Trump prides himself on his unpredictability—“My moves are totally uncalculated,” he boasted to one biographer. He’s known as a micromanager who insisted on personally signing company checks and calling people his employees had already contacted to check their work. By his own admission, he gets “bored too easily” and relishes shaking up a company or an industry. “My attention span is short and probably my least favorite thing to do is maintain the status quo,” he has written. “Instead of being content when everything is going fine, I start getting impatient and irritable.” The culture at Trump’s company has been described as Darwinian. “He really believed that having people fighting and in conflict for approval made them work harder,” Trump’s former executive secretary, Rhona Graff, once recounted.  American heroes (plus Trump and Piers Morgan.) (Getty Images.) The military leaders that Trump would inherit are, by all indications, less forceful personalities than Powell, Petraeus or McChrystal, but it’s hard to imagine them responding well to this kind of behavior. The current Joint Chiefs chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, is known as an especially skillful operator able to bridge the diplomatic and military worlds, with a low-key demeanor that helped to win over Obama. And in recent months, Dunford has found subtle ways to signal disapproval of Trump’s statements. When he was asked during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about Trump’s support for torture and attacking the families of suspected terrorists, Dunford didn’t mention Trump by name, but observed that such orders would have an “adverse effect” on “the morale of the force” and “aren’t legal for them to do anyway.” He also pushed back against Trump’s assertion that NATO was “very obsolete” by telling reporters, “In my mind, the relevance of NATO is not at all in question.” In an indication of how much Trump’s statements on national security have triggered intense debate within the military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has made it clear he doesn’t want officials weighing in on campaign politics. The nation’s intelligence agencies have also been gripped by similar anxieties about the prospect of a Trump presidency. CIA Director John Brennan recently told NBC News that he would refuse to execute orders from a future president to use waterboarding. John Rizzo, the former CIA general counsel who worked at the agency for 35 years, told me that the employees he still spoke with were “terrified” at the prospect of reopening the debates over the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. “Deep concern is a mild way of putting the prospect of their commander in chief basically ordering them to go down this road again given all the trauma,” he said. If Trump won and followed through on his proposals, Rizzo predicted an employee “exodus.” “At a minimum,” he went on, “people would refuse to participate in anything resembling the former interrogation program and insist on a transfer to another part of the agency where they wouldn’t be involved in these things.” Meanwhile, with Trump still in a strong position to clinch the Republican nomination, some current members of the military bureaucracy are starting to game out exactly what they would do if he were elected. There are some who think Trump’s brash persona might actually be an asset. Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel, told me he’d recently spoken to an active-duty colonel who thought Trump might force through welcome changes to the military establishment. “If Trump comes in and shakes up these graybeard idiots,” Wilkerson said the colonel told him, “I’m all for it.” But such sentiments seem very much the minority view. Earlier this year, Bryan McGrath, a defense consultant and former Navy officer of 21 years, watched in shock as Trump climbed to the top of the Republican field. He dusted off an anti-Trump manifesto he’d written the previous fall and sent it to Eliot Cohen, a former State Department adviser and professor at Johns Hopkins University. McGrath and Cohen polished up the letter, sent it to their contacts in the foreign policy community, and on March 2 published it on the website War on the Rocks with nearly 100 signatories. The letter charged that Trump would “make America less safe” and was “utterly unfitted to the office.”  Trump avoided the draft, but called his sex life in the 1980s “my personal Vietnam.” Citing his fear of sexually transmitted diseases, he said, "I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” (Getty Images.) After the letter was published, McGrath said, he heard from numerous active-duty officers voicing disgust for Trump. One junior officer said he would be duty-bound to resign his commission if Trump were elected. A more senior officer wrote to say, in McGrath’s words, that “if [Trump] thinks that I am going to carry out an unlawful order, he has another thing coming.” Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me in an email that he had also heard from an officer who said “he’d retire sooner than serve under President Trump.” I recently spoke to a 32-year-old Army reservist named John Ford, a captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Ford told me that he hadn’t taken Trump seriously as a candidate at the start of the year. But then Trump’s victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina solidified his first-place slot in polls for the GOP primary, and Ford started thinking in some detail about the unthinkable. “I would probably not resign right away” if Trump were elected, he told me. “I would see to what extent Congress can keep him in check.” Ford believed many other servicemen and servicewomen were grappling with this question: “They’re basically thinking to themselves, ‘How do I finesse this? What are the odds I personally would actually be asked to do something illegal or unconscionable?’” The choice, as Ford saw it, would come down to two options: Quit before you’re asked to do something illegal, or remain in the service and fight back against unlawful orders. Neither option was particularly appealing. The problem with quitting, Ford pointed out, wasn’t only that it meant giving up his career and letting down his fellow officers. It would mean a U.S. military dominated by the type of people who would go along with an off-the-rails Trump administration. “If everybody who disagrees shows up on January 21 and says we all resign, well, who’s left?” he asked. “It’s the people who are not going to provide any pushback and who aren’t going to sit on actions that are illegal.”

These three campaign gurus for Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have had some time to reflect on this nightmare of a campaign. And do they ever have stories to tell.