A Family Matter

Each year, California’s child protective services agencies remove thousands of kids from their homes. The story of how some parents decided to fight back.

By Jessica Weisberg

August 29, 2013 was Danyelle Branning’s day off. She worked as a nurse in a hospital intensive-care unit and was reading in bed at her home in Eastvale, California, a small city some 50 miles inland of Los Angeles. Around 3 p.m., she heard a knock on the door and opened it to find a policeman on the front step. He introduced himself as Deputy Taroo Curry from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. He was short, with a boyish face and curly hair, and he had a small microphone pinned to his jacket that recorded his conversations.

“Was there an incident or something that happened or occurred yesterday?” Curry said.

“Well, yes,” said Danyelle, shaking her head. She told Curry that she had caught her 16-year-old stepdaughter, Amber, smoking pot at an older boy’s house. That evening, Danyelle and her husband, Randy, called the sheriff’s non-emergency line for help. Amber was Randy’s daughter from a previous relationship, and she was failing out of school and getting into trouble. “She manipulates, and she lies and lies and lies. I can’t trust anything she says,” Danyelle told Curry. The operator had suggested a boot camp.

At 37, Danyelle resembled a grown-up version of a cheer captain from an eighties movie, with straight, dyed blond hair, bold blue eyes, and a blunt manner that exuded competence. Grounding Amber wasn’t working, so that night Danyelle and Randy had decided to try something harsher. The family had plans to go to Hawaii, but as punishment Amber would have to stay behind with her grandparents.

Over the years, Danyelle and Randy had hired therapists and tutors to help Amber, but nothing seemed to work. Neither of Danyelle’s or Randy’s parents would have been able to afford such things. Randy was raised by his dad, a psychiatric nurse who supported six boys; he was one of two brothers to graduate from high school. Danyelle was mostly raised by her single father. In addition to Amber, the couple had two young kids of their own, a ten-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son; I’ll call them Kelly and Cory. The Brannings had worked hard to give their children a stable life, but Amber’s behavior was pushing them to their limit.

“There was no sense of abuse or grabbing, or any physical abuse or anything back here at the house?” Curry said.

This surprised Danyelle. “No,” she said. “She was yelled at.”

As they stood in the doorway of the Brannings’ two-story stucco home, Curry explained to Danyelle that he had been dispatched to the house because earlier in the day, Amber had told her school counselor that during the argument her father had pushed her against the wall and head-butted her. He said there was some bruising on Amber’s arm. This also surprised Danyelle; she hadn’t noticed it.

A few minutes later, a white van pulled up in front of the house. Two women stepped out and walked toward Danyelle’s house, joining Curry.

Their names were Pamela Thompson-Dunn and Monique Jefferson, and they had been sent by Riverside County’s Department of Public Social Services. Thompson-Dunn said that she was following up on comments that Amber had made to her school guidance counselor about a violent incident the night before. How long had Amber been living with them? Thompson-Dunn wanted to know.

“Well, we didn’t find that she existed until she was five,” Danyelle said. She gave them the short version: In 2001, a short while before they got married, Randy received a notice in the mail asking him to submit to a paternity test. When he was 16, he’d had a one-night stand with a friend of a friend named Cassandra, and it turned out that he had a daughter named Amber in Iowa. In 2004, Cassandra was arrested on drug charges and stripped of custody, and shortly after, the Brannings filed to adopt Amber. The girl was 11 when she moved in.

“Is there any substance abuse between yourselves, with you or your husband?” Thompson-Dunn asked.

“No. I drink in the evening,” Danyelle said. Her days at the ICU were stressful, and she drank tequila to unwind.

“And what about your husband?” Thompson-Dunn said.

“My husband has a medical-marijuana card,” she said.

“What about domestic violence?” Thompson-Dunn said.

Danyelle was stunned. “We’re a team,” she said.

The four of them were still standing in the doorway when Kelly and Cory arrived home from school. Kelly looked young for her age, with plump cheeks and shiny, corn-colored hair; she spoke with the brisk efficiency of an executive hurrying off a phone call. “We met earlier,” she said to Thompson-Dunn, who had pulled her out of class that afternoon to talk about Amber. The conversation had upset Kelly. She didn’t like when her dad got angry, and she didn’t like talking to a stranger about it. Her meeting with Pam was the kind of thing she might have called her mom about if she had a cell phone, but her mom refused to let her have one. Danyelle was certain that cell phones were ruining this generation’s manners, and her kids were certain that this constituted a crime against humanity. Cory, a string bean with messy red hair, was eager to go inside; he had just gotten a PlayStation.

Curry asked if he could speak with Kelly alone. While the two of them headed to the living room, Danyelle texted Randy: “Call me. ASAP.” He worked as a concrete-pump operator and had left the house at 4:30 that morning for a job in San Diego. Randy called a few minutes later.

“CPS and the cops are here,” Danyelle told him.

She sounded nervous. “Tell them exactly what happened,” Randy said. “Relax, babe.”

“I don’t know,” Danyelle said. “There’s something funny.”

They hung up, and Danyelle walked into the living room looking for Thompson-Dunn. About ten minutes after she’d arrived, she told Danyelle that she felt it was too dangerous for the kids to be around Randy, so she was putting them in foster care.

What happened next was a blur. Danyelle asked Thompson-Dunn to wait until Randy got home, so she could hear his side of the story, but recalls that Thompson-Dunn said they needed to get going. Danyelle asked if the kids could stay with her if Randy moved out—after all, he was the only one who’d been accused of abuse. Thompson-Dunn told Danyelle that she was no different than her husband: In California, failing to report an act of child abuse was in itself an act of child abuse. “Battered women often protect their abusers,” Danyelle remembers her saying. Danyelle asked if she could bring the kids to her mother’s one-bedroom condo, 30 minutes away. The kids needed their own rooms, Thompson-Dunn said.

While Danyelle and Thompson-Dunn were talking, Curry asked Kelly to describe what happened the night before. Kelly had always idolized Amber. When Amber said her favorite pattern was zebra and her favorite color was blue, Kelly decided that hers were, too. When Amber decided that she wanted to become a vet, Kelly decided that she did, too.

Kelly told Curry that she had been in her room doing homework. She heard a lot of yelling, Amber crying, and three loud bangs that seemed to come from downstairs.

“My main concern was just, basically, with your sister and you seeing any physical violence between your dad and your sister,” Curry said.

“Never,” Kelly said. “He’s never showed any violence toward any of the kids; not my mom.”

That morning, Amber had told Kelly that their father had shoved her into a wall the night before. Kelly didn’t know what to think. Their dad was scary when he was angry—he got loud, and his face turned red—but she’d never seen him hurt anyone.

As Kelly was talking, Danyelle came into the living room. “I was told to pack you a bag,” she said, her voice low, almost calm. She sounded like she was in a daze. “They’re taking you guys. Just so you know, honey, they are not our friends. They’re not. These are not our friends.”

Kelly shrieked. Her breath became heavy and fast. “No!” she shouted.

Curry walked into the foyer, where Thompson-Dunn and Jefferson sat with Cory, who was crying into a pillow.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said.

“Amber told us that your dad… he’s not a nice person,” Thompson-Dunn said.

“Well, he is,” Cory shouted. He gasped for air between sobs.

“Can he be mean?” Thompson-Dunn said.

“No,” Cory said. “He’s frustrated.”

On the tape, you can hear Kelly in the background yelling, “Amber’s a liar! Amber’s a liar!”

Danyelle called Randy to tell him what was happening, but she was hardly able to form sentences. In the Brannings’ 12 years of marriage, Randy had never seen his wife panic. Danyelle was the calm one. It was Randy who lost his temper sometimes, who’d get upset and curse in front of the kids.

At 34, Randy had an auburn goatee, a sturdy, linebacker’s build, and portraits of his children tattooed on his right forearm in gray ink. He was working at a construction site, but he stopped what he was doing, latched his 800-pound cement mixer to the back of his truck, and drove off, the mixer swinging out behind him.

Traffic was bad, so he drove along the shoulder of the highway with his flashers on, pushing down on the horn. Drivers flipped him off as he passed. He tugged the steering wheel so hard he thought it might bend in half. He made the 100-mile drive in less than an hour, arriving home just after five.

When Randy walked through the front door, he found Danyelle lying on the living room floor in a fetal position. He lay down beside his wife, and they stayed there awhile, holding each other, sobbing. They couldn’t understand how a stranger could take their kids after just ten minutes in their home, no warrant, no formal review, no time to tell their side of the story. Randy hugged his wife close and whispered, “When this is over, we’re going to sue the shit out of these people.”

The lawyer they needed was Shawn McMillan, a San Diego–based attorney whose practice focuses on cases against California’s child protective services agencies. Ten years ago, McMillan was running a firm specializing in commercial and antitrust law. He liked the fight of a trial. “Bullets are flying. Nothing else in the world like it,” he told me. Then, in April 2005, McMillan’s dad told him about a woman he’d met who was looking for a lawyer. Her name was Deanna Fogarty-Hardwick. In the winter of 1999, her ex-husband was accused of sexually abusing one of their daughters. He lost custody but was granted monitored visits. When their daughters refused to see their dad, a social worker accused Fogarty-Hardwick of being uncooperative, and she also lost custody of the girls, who were placed in foster care. After almost six years, she had been reunited with her children and wanted to sue CPS for damages.

McMillan told me that at first he didn’t trust her. “I thought, These social workers are good people, out there for all the right reasons, doing a really tough job.” He would have turned down the case, but his dad had been moved by the woman’s story and pressured him into taking it. “I do what my dad says,” McMillan said.

McMillan argued the case, showing that the social worker had misrepresented Fogarty-Hardwick and had committed “judicial deception”—legalese for lying. The judge agreed and awarded Fogarty-Hardwick a $9.6 million settlement, the largest judgment against CPS in California history.

When McMillan returned to San Diego after a five-week trial, he sat in his living room and started crying. His son and daughter were six and nine, the same ages Fogarty-Hardwick’s children had been when they were taken. “I just start thinking how would that be? To be away from your kids?” A few months later, he shifted the focus of his practice from commercial law to suing CPS full-time.

Late last year, I went to visit McMillan’s office, which occupies the first floor of his house just outside San Diego. At 49, he has broad shoulders, a square jaw, and a preference for Hawaiian-print shorts when he’s not in court. Dozens of tae kwon do trophies line the windowsills and bookshelves; he still competes. There are three other lawyers who work at his firm, and on late nights McMillan’s wife invites everyone upstairs for dinner.

The firm handles about 15 cases at a time and turns down up to 200 a week. “I don’t reject them because they’re bad cases. I reject them because we can’t handle everything,” he said. “We have to do much better work than our opponents do to develop our case and develop credibility with the court.” After a decade, he’s so steeped in the material that he refers to precedents in the same way that sports fans refer to their favorite players. Troxel. Humphries.

In most parts of the U.S., child welfare is the responsibility of county government, with special agencies that investigate allegations of child abuse and ensure the safety of children. Caseworkers make the hard but often necessary decision to remove a child from a threatening situation before it becomes dangerous. They then place that child with extended family or in foster care and offer parents therapeutic services so that they might regain custody.

When an agency steps in, it challenges parents’ constitutional right to raise their own children. In 2000, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in a majority opinion that the parental right to make decisions for a child rested in the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “The interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children,” O’Connor wrote, “is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”

In California, caseworkers are required to obtain a warrant from a juvenile-court judge in order to remove a child from a home. The state allows that when a child is in “imminent danger,” there’s no time for paperwork, and caseworkers can remove children without obtaining a warrant. But without a clear definition of imminent danger, caseworkers often bypass the warrant process even when there’s no obvious physical risk.

Yet, despite the apparent need for guidelines, the federal government has never issued a clear definition of child abuse. “Nowhere in the federal government could we find one official assigned full-time to the prevention, identification, and treatment of child abuse and neglect,” wrote Walter Mondale, a senator from Minnesota, in 1973. The following year, Mondale pushed through the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which offered grants and funding to support state and community programs but did not provide direction as to how those programs should function. The law, which has since gone through many revisions, never defined what constituted an emergency or offered standards for when a child’s living situation should be deemed unsafe.

State lawmakers, too, are reluctant to restrict social workers with narrow definitions or to mandate a specific approach to child-rearing. The California statute defines abuse, in part, as “when the parent or guardian knew or reasonably should have known that the child was in danger of being subjected to an act or acts of cruelty.” Minnesota considers drug use during pregnancy a form of child abuse, but New York does not.

Child abuse is an exceptionally complicated thing to define. Spanking can be outright abusive or perfectly legal. Even less clear is the shift from mean-spirited to emotionally abusive, or the moment when an overworked parent becomes a neglectful one. Likewise, there’s no universal definition of risk—one person’s nightmare is another person’s Tuesday. Are three children, all under the age of eight, left alone in a motel room while their mother goes on a job interview at risk of “serious harm”? Yes, according to a CPS social worker in Orange County, California, who had those children placed in foster care. What if a parent has a criminal record or a drug problem, or dates someone who does, or smokes indoors with the windows closed, or has a mental illness?

In most cases, counties are left to decide when poor parenting becomes maltreatment. CPS workers are empowered to intervene based on their own criteria, quickly assessing a situation with as little as a brief interview. “Social workers are essentially asked to read tea leaves,” said Jennifer Reich, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver and the author of Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System. “They have a limited amount of information with which to try and predict which kids are unsafe.”

As a result, social workers are often entitled to enter a home without a warrant, based on nothing but an anonymous tip, and in most states subsequent hearings and records are never released to the public. Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, told me that “all over the country, social workers take children entirely on their own authority.” According to a report from Wexler’s organization, caseworkers in most states have “unlimited power and no accountability.”

Inevitably, this lack of standards and high degree of autonomy can result in costly errors in judgment. Without guidelines, caseworkers’ field assessments can run afoul of the courts’ interpretations of the statute and result in expensive litigation. Federal courts have consistently found that without hard evidence of imminent risk, a parent and child have a constitutional right to continue living together. In 2001, a federal court ruled that a county social worker had violated the law when she removed a girl from her home without a warrant in response to allegations that the child had been sexually abused by her stepfather. In the court’s view, the social worker did not have reason to believe that the child was in danger of imminent harm. In 2007, the same court ruled, in Rogers v. County of San Joaquin, that a social worker who removed two young children from their home without a warrant after observing their rotted teeth, soiled diapers, and a loaded gun in their parents’ dresser was wrong to asses the situation as an “emergency” and should have obtained a court order. Yes, their health and living situation were worrisome, but there was no indication of imminent danger. The judge determined that taking a child from the home when there was no clear emergency violated the child’s Fourth Amendment rights and constituted an “unreasonable search and seizure.”

McMillan’s cases alone have cost California CPS agencies more than $20 million since 2005. When I went to his office last year, his caseload included a father who’d temporarily lost custody for using an illegal substance, marijuana, around his child even though he had a license for medicinal use, a black family whose kids were taken away after the grandfather called the white social worker a racist, and two teenage boys from San Diego who had been removed from their home after their mother was caught writing a false check. The boys had been placed in a foster home run by a man who then molested them both repeatedly, filmed himself doing so, and posted the videos online. “How much money is enough to settle that?” McMillan said.

Pamela Thompson-Dunn, the social worker from CPS, drove Kelly and Cory to pick up Amber at her school, then took the kids for burgers at Carl’s Jr. After dinner she drove them to her office at the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services, a stout white building with a zigzagging ramp out front. It reminded Kelly of an amusement-park entrance.

Inside, Thompson-Dunn started making calls to find them a place to sleep that night. When children are removed from their home, and there’s no extended family able to care for them, they are placed in a foster home. In 1986, California started outsourcing the recruitment and training of foster families to private agencies and charities, hoping that such groups would better convince community members to open up their homes to local children in need. Now California spends $400 million a year on private foster care; it’s the largest such system in the country. In Los Angeles County alone, 80 percent of children placed in foster homes go to privately run facilities.

By 11 p.m., Thompson-Dunn had found foster-care placements for all three of the children through two private agencies—a bed for Amber in a Fred Jefferson home, and beds for Kelly and Cory through Avant-Garde Foster Agency. Around midnight, they pulled up in front of a compact, two-story house with a row of palm trees in the front yard. Thompson-Dunn told Kelly and Cory to gather their things. They hugged Amber and told her they loved her before climbing out of the car.

They were greeted by a round, soft-spoken woman, whom I’ll call Ellen, with two barking black Labs at her heels. Her husband, whom I’ll call Jake, was shorter than she was and wore a baseball cap with fish on it. Cory thought his hat was funny.

Ellen asked right away if there were any foods they didn’t like and promised not to make them. She pointed out the pool in the backyard and showed them to their beds—Cory’s was in a room with two other boys around his age. Kelly had a private room on the second floor.

Shortly after he settled in for the night, Cory woke up with a start. He felt something squeezing his scrotum, hard. He opened his eyes and saw one of the other foster children hovering over him. He kissed Cory on the lips, then the neck, before Cory yelled and shoved him away. His yelling woke up Ellen, who moved Cory into a private room that shared a wall with her and Jake’s bedroom. The door didn’t lock, so they told Cory to place a chair against it and came up with a secret knock so he could let them know through the wall if anything happened.

The next day, Kelly remembers that Ellen discouraged them from reporting the incident to Thompson-Dunn. I was unable to reach Ellen and Jake for comment; Avant-Garde, which arranged the placement, does not share the personal details of its foster families.

Cory’s experience wasn’t unusual. A 2013 study by the Los Angeles Times found that children placed in homes run by private agencies were about a third more likely to be the victims of serious physical, emotional, or sexual abuse while living there than children in state-supervised foster-family homes. Roughly two months earlier, the L.A. County Department of Family Services had completed a review of the 60 homes run by the Fred Jefferson agency, which had handled Amber’s placement, and found that children at several of them had not been properly supervised—kids had been injured on the premises or were permitted to drink alcohol—and two of the homes had permanent residents with criminal records.

Ellen said they could skip school that day, since they’d slept so little the night before. That morning, Danyelle called the school to make sure the kids were there and panicked when she found out that they weren’t. It was Labor Day weekend, so they would have Monday off, too. The children spent the weekend swimming, watching TV, and playing with the dogs, trying to keep to themselves.

“The other kids had real problems, like psychological problems,” Kelly said when I spoke with her this past winter. Cory kept getting in trouble all weekend—for making a mess or playing too rough—but he didn’t mind. “I liked time out, because I could stay away from people,” he told me.

Ellen dropped them off at school on Tuesday. It was comforting to see familiar faces, eat familiar foods, walk familiar hallways. But it was impossible to concentrate in class. Kelly couldn’t go ten minutes without crying.

The Brannings were banned from seeing their kids without a government-approved escort, but they were so desperate that on Tuesday, they snuck into the school and waited for them in the cafeteria. When Cory saw his parents, he darted over and plopped into his mom’s lap. Kelly arrived shortly after and threw her arms around her dad’s neck. Kelly decided not to tell her parents about what had happened to Cory—her mom already seemed so upset. Instead, Kelly asked if they knew how Amber was doing. They didn’t. They were still angry and hadn’t tried to see her.

Shawn McMillan is one of eight lawyers in California who focus on civil cases against CPS; four of them work in his office. In 2014, after filing more than 30 cases in California, and settling all but two, he began noticing a trend: CPS workers were removing kids from their homes without a warrant even when there was no indication of an emergency.

McMillan started collecting data from around California about the incidence of warrantless removals. He discovered that since 1996, Orange and Riverside Counties had seized more than 80,000 children without a warrant. When he saw the numbers, he decided he had to bring class-action lawsuits against both counties.

In some ways, Riverside and Orange Counties are odd choices for a class-action suit; these are predominantly middle-class exurbs of Los Angeles, more than 70 percent white, and often associated with beach towns, Land Rovers, and MTV reality shows. Overall, white children represent less than 25 percent of children in California foster homes, and studies consistently show that CPS is more likely to remove children from families of color, especially African Americans. Data on warrantless removals for every county in the state isn’t readily available, but California’s average rate of removal, according to a 2015 study by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, is 3.3 for every 1,000 children. Riverside and Orange actually have lower removal rates than many other parts of the state. The rate is 3.7 in Riverside County and 1.6 in Orange County; in some counties, the rate is as high as 15.8. McMillan told me that eventually he hopes to “bring all 58 counties in the state kicking and screaming into compliance with the law.”

Amber’s own childhood in Iowa offers the perfect illustration of just how varied CPS caseworkers can be in their response to allegations of abuse. The agency had been a fixture in her life since the year 2000, when Amber was three years old. At the time, she was living with her mom, Cassandra, and her three half-siblings in a mobile home in Allerton, Iowa. An anonymous caller told CPS that the kids weren’t being fed. A CPS worker visited the house, noting in the report, “children are believed to be safe in the mother’s home.”

In 2001, Cassandra moved her family to Missouri, where both she and Randy grew up. She was living on government assistance, and her caseworker sent DNA tests to Amber’s possible fathers—Randy told me that he was among four men who received the test. When the results came back positive, Randy started visiting Amber once or twice a year and calling a few times a month.

By 2002, Cassandra and her children had returned to Iowa, and another anonymous caller reported that Cassandra used meth in the children’s presence. The CPS worker who visited the home wrote in a report that “there is not a preponderance of evidence that Cassandra Davis, the biological mother of these children, possessed or used methamphetamine.”

In the spring of 2004, a few months after Cassandra gave birth to her fifth child, she was charged with methamphetamine possession and fled Iowa. Some weeks later, CPS discovered that Cassandra had left her children with her sister, who had a meth lab in her basement, according to an agency report from the time. Cassandra temporarily lost custody of her children and was only permitted to see them during monitored visits.

Amber was seven at the time, and Randy wanted to formally adopt her. In early 2005, Amber came to California and lived with the Brannings for almost a year. But then, according to Randy, CPS decided that Cassandra, who had just completed a rehab program, deserved another chance to raise her children, and Amber was sent back to Iowa. For Randy, it was awful to part with his daughter after he’d just gotten to know her. “The whole process was hard and heartbreaking,” he told me. Within a year Cassandra had relapsed, and her children were sent to live with her parents in a small town north of Des Moines.

Randy still wanted full custody, but Amber’s caseworker was reluctant to separate her from her siblings. Randy missed his Amber, but he was hopeful about her new living situation with her grandfather, Michael, who was a preacher.

For her ninth birthday, Randy and Danyelle sent Amber two Harry Potter books. When they called Amber to see how she was enjoying them, they found out that her grandfather had burned them. That’s when Randy decided that Amber belonged with him and Danyelle. The process took almost two years, but eventually a judge decided that, as the biological father, Randy’s rights trumped those of Amber’s grandparents. “We felt very confident that Amber should stay with us. We felt that given how much change she’d gone through, moving wasn’t a good thing for her,” Michael recently told me. “I think Randy’s a great guy and that he could be a top-notch father, I just happen to disagree with them on the concept of God and spiritual matters.” Michael also worried about Amber’s transition from homeschooling to a large public school.

On the afternoon Randy came to pick her up, in early 2008, Amber was hysterical: She didn’t want to leave her youngest brother. To help her adjust to life in California, he and Danyelle quickly found Amber a therapist. “We expected there to be some difficulties,” Danyelle told me. But Amber seemed to thrive. She was behind in school—Michael’s homeschool curriculum hadn’t covered much science or math—but she worked hard and caught up, and she completed sixth grade with mostly B’s and A’s. She joined the ice-skating team. She was a talented, fearless skater, with her dad’s short, muscular legs, eager to try flips and aerials. As she twirled, Randy told me, her thick, curly ponytail would lasso through the air.

When Amber started high school, things began to change. She skipped school more often than she went and threw house parties whenever Danyelle and Randy went out, drinking their liquor and then filling the bottles with water. She hid report cards and forged Danyelle’s signature so her stepmother wouldn’t know she was failing most of her classes. She got kicked off the ice-skating team. Randy found a dildo and condoms in her room. She promised that they were a joke, but Randy didn’t believe her. “You’re not a whore, so quit acting like one,” he told her.

Randy and Danyelle grounded her. They “double grounded” her, which meant she was confined to her room. They took away her cell phone. They shouted at her.

Amber missed Iowa, missed her siblings, missed her mother. Cassandra wasn’t supposed to have unmonitored contact with her kids, but Amber would secretly chat with her mom on Facebook. Kelly told me that Amber used to fantasize aloud about how she was going to call CPS, get their dad arrested, and return to Iowa. Kelly never thought Amber would actually go through with it.

CPS fieldwork is complicated and requires sensitivity to varying parenting styles across different ethnic and class backgrounds. In California, caseworkers complete a nine-week course mandated by all CPS agencies across the state; for those without a professional degree in social work, it’s the only formal training they receive. Caseworkers for Riverside County go to the Public Child Welfare Training Academy at the San Diego State University School of Social Work. A representative refused to speak with me and referred me to a website about the California Common Core that outlines the major bullet points of the curriculum.

The curriculum tries to formalize the process of responding to allegations of child abuse. First, social workers are supposed to “engage the parents,” to help them find ways to mitigate their children’s feeling of danger. If the kids are afraid of Dad, then the social worker should encourage Mom to make him leave. If staying at home isn’t an option, the next best thing is to place the children with an extended-family member. If there’s no family nearby, then the social worker should take the children into government custody, but only after a warrant has been obtained.

As I read through these recommendations, I struggled to understand why Cory and Kelly were taken from their home. Danyelle told me that she had offered to ask Randy to leave, but Thompson-Dunn said that wasn’t an option. She had also suggested her mother’s condo, but Thompson-Dunn said that it was too cramped.

Jennifer Reich, the sociologist, told me that the assessment process can’t be routinized and that removing a child from their home is always a gut decision. Some counties have tried checklists, but that approach hasn’t worked. “I’m not sure if there’s a bureaucratic process that gets you out of a subjective decision,” Reich said. Thompson-Dunn felt that the Brannings were dangerous and acted accordingly.

California state law gives caseworkers qualified immunity from civil rights violations. They cannot go to jail or lose their job for a needless removal, as long as they acted in “good faith.” The same applies if a child they’ve investigated is injured or dies in the care of their biological family. But the latter scenario will put the social worker on the front page of the local paper and may lead to criminal charges. In April, four Los Angeles County social workers were charged with felony child abuse for failing to appropriately respond to numerous allegations of abuse in the case of an eight-year-old boy who was later killed. Given such high stakes, Forrest Mosten, a family-law specialist and a professor at UCLA, told me that social workers would “rather be safe than sorry. If [CPS is] wrong, they figure the family will heal again.”

Ruth Supranovich, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California, worked in San Diego County’s CPS office on and off for 14 years. After about two years as a protective-services worker and near constant exposure to abusive households, she said that she “got burned out to the point that I didn’t trust people.” Supranovich likened being a caseworker to being a police officer. “You have to remind yourself that we deal with 1 percent of the population, and it can skew the way you look at the world,” she said. As a result, the turnover rate is high. In Sacramento County, CPS hired 106 social workers between July 1, 2015, and May 31, 2016; by August of this year, 83 of them had already resigned.

In 2009, when California was facing a $40 billion deficit, administrators made $121 million in cuts to its child-welfare and foster-care services. When agencies are underfunded, caseworkers are forced to rush through cases. Social workers in Riverside County have a starting a salary of $47,860. Their hours are long, and hardly anyone stays long enough to receive a pension.

Before she left with the Branning kids, Thompson-Dunn gave Danyelle a sheet of flimsy yellow paper—it looked like a diner receipt—with a court date written on it. The Brannings had a hearing at the Riverside County Juvenile Court the following week.

A few days later, Deputy Curry returned to the house. His findings would determine whether the Brannings would face criminal charges. Randy told me that Curry examined the house closely, looking for dents in the walls or other evidence of an altercation. He interviewed Randy and Danyelle; he taped that interview as well. (These tapes, as well as those from August 29, were provided to me by someone close to the case.)

Randy explained to Curry that on the night of the incident, he had told Amber to go to her room. Instead, she plopped down on the stairs and refused to budge. Randy grabbed her by the arm and walked her to her room. He was angry that night, with himself and with Amber—nothing seemed to be working with her. At one point, he was so furious that he punched a wastepaper basket and threw it down the stairs. Those were the thumps Kelly mentioned to Curry.

At the end of the interview, Curry told them, “You guys are good people from what I can see, and you guys are doing what you can for your kids.” Curry’s remarks left them with a sense of relief and the impression that they would avoid criminal charges. But to get their kids back, they still had to go through family court.

The family-court system was established in the early 20th century as one of the country’s first experiments in rehabilitative justice. Instead of imposing a punishment, its goal is to address the underlying problem that led an offender to commit a crime. If a crime was committed under the influence of alcohol, for instance, the sentence would be an addiction program. Parents accused of abuse are often required to complete therapeutic courses—like anger management or Narcotics Anonymous—in order to be reunited with their children. In some cases, the court can provide expensive services that might not otherwise be accessible to families. But other times, parents can feel patronized, compelled to complete unnecessary programs for the sake of complying with their caseworker and getting their children back. “Of course, voluntary participation in therapeutic processes is quite different than coerced participation in services,” writes Reich in her book Fixing Families, where she describes CPS’s social-welfare programs as both “a blessing and a curse.” As she writes, “While it provides much needed support for poor women and their children, it has also been a means for the state to evaluate and police individual families.”

It’s difficult to accurately portray what happens inside family-court hearings, because most proceedings are closed to the public; according to the National Coalition for Child Protection, only 15 states allow public access to court hearings in child-abuse cases. The measure is intended to protect the child’s privacy, but it also means that the press is typically banned from courtrooms. Throughout most of California, case files are accessible only to the family, lawyers, law enforcement, the child’s caseworker, and school representatives. The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has called for “lifting the veil of secrecy” that surrounds the system. “Open court proceedings will increase public awareness of the critical problems faced by juvenile and family courts and by child welfare agencies in matters involving child protection, [and] may enhance accountability in the conduct of these proceedings,” a council bulletin argued.

The first hearing in child-abuse cases, often known as the detention hearing, is similar to an arraignment. The judge reviews a social worker’s petition, which explains her reasoning for removing a child, and decides whether to continue the proceedings or send the kid back home. While researching her book, Reich observed more than 200 detention hearings in an unnamed county in Northern California and witnessed a judge dismiss a social worker’s petition only a few times. She said that most of these detention hearings lasted between three and ten minutes. “Because it’s a confidential system, it’s hard to talk about the issues that come with it publicly,” Reich said.

To prepare for the detention hearing, Randy and Danyelle collected letters of support from friends, employers, and neighbors. They wanted to make a strong first impression on their court-appointed lawyers. But when they met their attorneys at the Riverside Juvenile Court, they got the sense that the only way forward was to agree with the social worker’s assessment and comply with CPS’s recommendations, no matter what. Danyelle’s lawyer had seen the CPS petition that suggested Danyelle was a heavy drinker and recommended that she accept a kind of plea bargain—11 weeks of alcohol-addiction therapy in return for her children. Danyelle felt trapped and angry: She insisted that she didn’t have a drinking problem and hated the idea of going through a treatment program she didn’t need.

Danyelle and Randy asked the judge to pause the proceedings for 24 hours so that they could hire new attorneys. A neighbor introduced them to Art and Michael LaCilento, twin brothers who often worked as a team. The Brannings met them for coffee and liked them immediately. The LaCilento brothers are fast-talking, blocky men, with dark, curly hair. They seemed confident that they could get the kids back, but they didn’t come cheap. They wanted a $7,000 retainer up front. The Brannings emptied their savings, and Danyelle borrowed an additional $2,000 from her mom.

The first order of business, Art said, was a change in venue, because the Riverside County judge they’d been assigned always found the mother at fault, always sided with the county. “Sit out here today,” Danyelle remembers him saying, right before their first court appearance, “and watch every single person come out of here in tears.” When it was their turn, Art asked for the case to be moved to another court. Sure, the judge said, they could go to Indio—80 miles away. That meant the Brannings would have to pay each brother an additional $1,400 for every court appearance. With some haggling, the case got moved to Murrieta, 40 miles south.

The next day, at the Murrieta Juvenile Court, Art seemed much more at ease. The judge there was a friend of his. Danyelle overheard the two of them talking golf in the hallway before the trial began. For the first time since her kids were taken, Danyelle was confident that she’d get them back.

Art and Michael had their clients wait in the hallway during the detention hearing. They worried that Danyelle or Randy might say something that would hurt their chances. Reich’s research shows that parents who are compliant and deferential, who agree to whatever therapeutic program their case worker has assigned them, have better luck getting their kids back. Neither Danyelle nor Randy are naturally compliant or deferential people; they’re direct, foul-mouthed, and defensive.

By this point, Deputy Curry had completed his investigation and determined that there wasn’t enough evidence to press charges. The Brannings, Curry had concluded, were using “stern discipline to correct Amber’s carefree ways before it becoming [sic] a great deal in the future.” For Danyelle, this was promising but confounding news: If the police wasn’t pressing charges, why were they still on trial?

CPS’s petition had arrived at the Brannings’ home by mail a few days before. It stated that, according to Amber, her father had head-butted and shoved her into a wall, prompting her to speak with a guidance counselor. Amber had told Thompson-Dunn that her father regularly called her names like “bitch,” “slut,” and “whore.” Randy and Danyelle told me that Thompson-Dunn never returned to interview them, so the report only reflected her interviews with Amber and their children.

The petition also listed a number of details and anecdotes that did not pertain to the altercation between Amber and her father that Wednesday night. Kelly and Cory had told Thompson-Dunn that their parents had spanked them when they were younger. It stated that Randy smoked marijuana and that Danyelle “drinks alcohol on a daily basis,” and described an incident, based on interviews with the children, when Randy had snatched away Danyelle’s keys and cell phone so she couldn’t leave the house and had thrown her against a glass table. The report also mentioned that Randy’s brother had sought a restraining order against him but failed to mention that the order had been denied.

Reich told me that once a case is brought to a family-court judge, it’s “no longer about the allegation. It’s about everything in that person’s life.” A judge may determine that a case worker was wrong to remove a child, that there weren’t exigent circumstances to justify doing so, but may still decide to keep the child in foster care because something suspicious about the accused parent has come to light—a history of mental illness, for instance, or drug abuse. “It’s the weirdest part of jurisprudence,” said Reich of the family court system. “It’s not like any other system you’ve been through.” Few parents know how to navigate it.

As Danyelle and Randy waited in the hallway, they kept wishing that they were at criminal court instead of family court. Criminal court seemed simpler, more linear. First you committed a crime, then you were charged, then you went to trial, and then, if found guilty, you were punished. Their situation felt backward. The punishment had preceded the trial. The police had found no evidence of wrongdoing and decided not to press charges, yet the children had already been taken away—the worst punishment imaginable.

Art came out of the courtroom. The judge had decided to push on with the Brannings’ case. Randy and Danyelle would need to comply with CPS recommendations if they wanted their kids to come home.

On September 9, eleven days after the Branning children were first removed from the house, Randy and Danyelle returned to Murrieta for what’s called a team decision-making meeting. The idea behind a team meeting is to create a collaborative environment among the social workers and family. There’s typically no judge and no government lawyers, but CPS is involved in all aspects of a child-abuse case; they remove children from their parents and facilitate their return. It’s roughly the equivalent of a homicide detective also serving as a parole officer.

Danyelle, Randy, and their lawyers sat in a conference room with Thompson-Dunn and several other representatives from CPS. Thompson-Dunn ordered Danyelle to attend a course for victims of domestic violence and Randy to move out of the house and complete a program for domestic-violence abusers. In exchange, the LaCilentos were able to negotiate Cory and Kelly’s immediate return. The Brannings agreed.

Randy told me that Thompson-Dunn warned him that he had to pack up every last personal possession; if CPS discovered any indication—a toothbrush or a wallet—that he was living there, the kids could be removed again. He’d be permitted to have weekly monitored visits. In the meantime, Amber would remain in foster care. Danyelle wasn’t ready to let her come home.

Later that day, Danyelle met Ellen at a Starbucks parking lot to pick up Cory and Kelly. That night, Danyelle made a pot roast, and when they finished eating, they laid in bed and watched A Christmas Story. The house was quiet without Amber, without Randy. When the movie was over, Kelly made Cory tell their mom about what happened during their first night with Ellen, about the boy who touched him and the coded knock. “That’s when I realized that the nightmare wasn’t over,” Danyelle said. Her son was even more traumatized than she’d imagined. She was even more determined to sue the people responsible.

Kelly told me that coming home was even harder than being in foster care. It was hard to watch her mother in pain and hard to live there without her older sister. She felt like she didn’t know who to trust anymore.

Danyelle took an extended leave from the hospital. The week after the kids came home, she was supposed to start her victims-of-violence class, but when she arrived at the first session, she learned that she’d been enrolled in an anger-management course instead. Eventually, she signed up for the right class, but on the first day her instructor told her that she didn’t qualify, and she stopped going. Thompson-Dunn checked in every two weeks or so to see how the family was adjusting. Everyone was still tense and missing Randy and Amber.

Randy moved into a Motel 6 until friends invited him to stay in their guest room. On the first day of his class for domestic-violence abusers, the instructor asked everyone in the class to write down the last time they had abused their domestic partner. Randy wrote, “I’m here because CPS falsely stole my kids.” It was supposed to be a six-week course, but the instructor canceled the remaining sessions after two weeks or so.

In mid-October, Thompson-Dunn called for another team meeting and concluded that Randy should be allowed to come home. When he arrived, Kelly and Cory jumped all over him; Danyelle, too. They ordered a pizza. “We did a lot of hugging on each other,” Randy told me. “It was a good day.” The other outcome of the team meeting was that Thompson-Dunn would continue to visit every two weeks to check up on them. Danyelle told me that Thompson-Dunn called occasionally, but once Randy returned home, she never came to the house again.

Around Thanksgiving, a CPS representative notified Danyelle and Randy that Amber had run away from her foster home. She’d packed her bag and left her foster parents a note, writing that that she had fallen in love and was going to live with her boyfriend. “Thank you for everything,” she wrote. Thompson-Dunn went to Amber’s school, but no one had seen her. CPS hired a private investigator and tried to reach Cassandra, her biological mother, but couldn’t track her down.

Randy panicked and called Amber’s cell phone. “You never have to speak to me again if you don’t want to,” he said in a voice mail. “Just let me know that you’re OK.” He turned to Facebook for clues. Around the New Year, Cassandra posted a message suggesting that she and Amber had reunited: “Am prayin this new yr God allows me to be a great mother to my children cosistantly.”

Randy had no idea how Amber was doing, and what he read on Facebook worried him. “Out of jail,” Cassandra posted on July 24, 2014. “Amber, thank u for all the hard work and dedication you presented to get me out of jail…. I’ll love and cherish you more than you’ll ever know.”

Then, a few weeks later, things between Cassandra and Amber appeared to sour. Cassandra accused Amber of being a liar. “U understand me little girl you need to check yourself and have some respect for yourself and your mother stop being wishy-washy for attention.”

To which Amber replied, “You are nothing but a worthless doper to me.”

A few months after the kids came home, Art LaCilento introduced the Brannings to Shawn McMillan, who had represented several of LaCilento’s former clients. In February 2014, Randy and Danyelle drove to San Diego to meet him. McMillan liked them immediately: They were hardworking and big-hearted, the kind of people, as McMillan said, whom judges meet and “they just go, Oh shit, how did these idiot social workers miss this?”

On July 1, 2014, they filed a suit against Riverside County, Pamela Thompson-Dunn, several other social workers involved in their case, and both the Avant-Garde and Fred Jefferson foster agencies. The suit accuses the defendants of violating the Brannings’ First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, of invading their privacy, and of failing to protect their children. The suit argues that Thompson-Dunn did not have the evidence to remove the children without a warrant, that Cory should have been able to share a room with his sister, and that Amber’s foster parents should have recognized that she was at risk of flight. “The Branning family continues to experience great worry, heartache, and grief over the uncertain state of [Amber’s] whereabouts and condition,” McMillan wrote in the complaint. In a written response, filed on November 19, 2014, CPS’s attorneys refuse to address those accusations, citing a California statute that prohibits discussion of children who have been in protective custody. The Deputy Curry tapes surfaced in April 2015, during the discovery period. McMillan knew that the county wouldn’t want to go to trial with a record of one of the children declaring that she’d never seen her father be violent. Weeks after the tapes were released, the county reached out about a settlement negotiation.

It’s hard to quantify the trauma of losing a child. McMillan calculates a fair settlement by charging the government $2,000 to $10,000 per child for every day they were in government custody. Amber, Cory, and Kelly had together spent a total of 104 days in foster care, but given other aspects of their situation—that Cory had been molested and Amber had run away—McMillan thought $800,000 was the right number. His office takes between 25 and 50 percent of the settlement. Nearly all his cases end in settlements; he has taken only a handful to trial.

The settlement negotiation began at ten in the morning on July 15. McMillan and the Brannings sat in a small, colorless room at the Orange County Mediation Center as a tireless mediator, an older woman in a skirt suit, bounced back and forth between them and CPS’s attorneys, who sat in a nearby room. CPS’s initial offer was $100,000. Danyelle told the mediator that they weren’t going to settle for less than a million. Around lunchtime, McMillan walked over to the CPS attorneys and played portions of the Deputy Curry tapes, the part where Kelly said that she’d never seen her father abuse any member of her family. “That’s when it turned around,” Danyelle said.

By 10:30 p.m., CPS had upped its offer to $750,000. Danyelle didn’t want to settle for less than $800,000, so McMillan decided to give them a $25,000 discount on attorney fees by taking a lower commission. Around midnight they signed the final papers.

The settlement meant that CPS did not have to admit wrongdoing in the case or discipline any employees. When I reached out to Riverside County CPS regarding the matter, a spokesperson responded with a statement: “We want to stress Riverside County’s commitment first and foremost, to protect children, and to carry out our duties and responsibilities with professionalism, compassion and a commitment to complying with all applicable laws, policies, and regulations.” According to her LinkedIn page, Thompson-Dunn left Riverside County CPS in March 2016 and now works at a nonprofit in Los Angeles. She declined to be interviewed for this story. Through the agency, the foster family has denied that Cory was sexually assaulted when in their care.

Once the settlement was reached, McMillan decided to move forward with the class-action lawsuit against Riverside County CPS. The Brannings were the “motivating factor in finally doing it,” McMillan told me. The certification hearing, in which a judge determines if the case meets the standards of a class-action suit, is expected to take place this fall. According to the New York Times, class-action suits have been filed against CPS in 19 states, but if accepted, McMillan’s will be the first in California. The parent of the lead plaintiff of the case was in the hospital, recovering from labor, when a county social worker seized her newborn child. The social worker did not have a warrant.

Spending time with another family is like traveling to a foreign country. Each has its own culture, forged over generations. Unraveling that history is the work of a lifetime—hard to do with our own families, let alone a stranger’s. But over the months that I spent with Danyelle and Randy, I began to understand that their family runs on a mix of candor, kindness, and discipline, fueled by the Brannings’ desire to see their children outdo them. Both are direct with their children, upfront about their feelings, and curious about their kids’ hobbies and interests. One day I rode with Randy as he picked up Kelly from cheerleading practice. Kelly got in the car, and Randy peppered her with questions about every rule and regulation. Danyelle sets hard limits—like the amount of time Cory and Kelly spend online—but she’s also affectionate and genuinely delights in her children. She can’t help but giggle when Cory speaks out of turn at dinner with some random observation, and she helped Kelly dye her hair with purple Kool-Aid.

Randy has sworn to me, stone-faced, that he has never hurt or hit his wife. Danyelle has confirmed this. They admit to spanking their kids when they were little; both Danyelle and Randy had been raised that way and saw no problem with it. They admit that when they fight they can get operatically loud and use configurations of words that aren’t permitted on network television. There had been one particularly vile fight where Danyelle had stormed from the house and Randy had snatched her car keys and hid them.

“I called him an asshole,” Danyelle said. “Is it right? No. Does it happen? Yes.”

“There were a couple times I called her a bitch,” Randy said. “Is that an everyday occurrence? Of course not.”

It’s hard to imagine a government code with the sensitivity and capaciousness to address all the forms that abuse can assume. The CPS system allows individual social workers the flexibility to wade through the endless gray areas of family life instead of following a rigid rulebook. But that means they inevitably apply their own expectations of good and bad parenting when they’re assessing families, even when the family is nothing like their own. Enforcing clearer standards of what constitutes an emergency and requiring warrants when those standards aren’t met would relieve social workers of some responsibility and protect children and parents’ constitutional rights. But new standards would present new risks: There would almost certainly be cases that turned into emergencies before social workers could obtain the necessary paperwork.

I spoke to Amber a couple of months ago by phone. She had recently gotten engaged, and her fiancé has a kid. As a new stepparent, she felt terrible about the way she had treated her father and Danyelle. “I think all my dad was trying to do was protect me, but I’m the kind of person who needs to find out for myself,” she told me. “If I had known they were going to take Kelly and Cory, I never would’ve talked to my counselor.”

She told me that she, too, read the CPS petition and was stunned by how her words had been twisted. “Almost everything she put in there was a lie,” Amber now says. She told me that she never said to Thompson-Dunn that her father head-butted her or smashed her head into a wall; she never saw her dad abuse Danyelle. She does think that her father was too rough with her that night. “He grabbed me so hard he left finger marks on my arm,” she told me. But that was the only instance in which her dad had ever physically disciplined her.

I asked Randy how his relationship with Amber had evolved. He told me that soon after she turned 18, she called him to apologize. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” she said. Randy has mostly forgiven Amber. When she called him one night because she didn’t have a place to sleep, he paid for a motel room. They speak regularly by phone and Facebook. They say “I love you” before they hang up.

Most of the settlement money has gone into a college fund for Kelly and Cory. So far the Brannings have received about $150,000 of it, some of which they used to build a swimming pool for the kids. They’re glad to have the money, but it doesn’t change what happened. Kelly’s gone through seven therapists in the past three years. Cory’s teachers report that he’s fidgety and distractible, and when Danyelle sends him to his room he sometimes threatens to call CPS on her. Perhaps worst of all, Danyelle told me, “I’m afraid of my own children now.”

Biased and Phony Media Descend on Cleveland to Cover Very Very Tremendous Convention. Enjoy!

Dispatches from the 2016 Republican National Convention.

By Justin Peters

Hi, I’m Justin Peters. I’m going to Cleveland next week to cover the Republican National Convention for The Atavist Magazine. I’m a journalist, and have been for many years, but I’m not particularly qualified for this assignment: I haven’t been on the campaign trail at all this year, and I haven’t written regularly about politics for a long time. I did, however, appear on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? twice last year, which, in this weird postmodern election cycle, basically makes me cabinet material.

There’s a long-standing journalistic tradition of sending semi-outsiders to report on conventions, to indulge in the spectacle as a means of ferreting out substance. In this political season, more than any other I can remember, the spectacle is the substance. The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, is an erratic former reality-television star and an accomplished ogler whose campaign philosophy can be reduced to two phrases: “I’m not here to make friends” and “Look at me!”

So maybe the best way to think about this moment, in our inherently performative political era, is as the penultimate elimination round of the greatest reality show in history. Maybe the answers to our national future lie not in the rules committee but in the spectacle itself. Maybe Donald Trump and I are both the right man for the right time. I’m going to find out.

Trump Supporters: A Taxonomy

Last week’s presidential debate was a surreal 90-minute episode of cognitive dissonance. On one side of the stage was Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, who, though a polarizing figure, is inarguably a serious and competent person who has devoted much of her adult life to public service. On the other side was Donald J. Trump, the erratic insult comedian and real estate developer who is best known for residing in an eponymous tower and firing Dennis Rodman on television before rising from immodest means to capture the Republican nomination. Clinton has ideas and experience. Trump has novelty hats and hand gestures. History will not absolve us.

Which debate moment was the weirdest? Was it when Trump claimed that his best asset was his temperament? When he implied that it was “smart” to avoid paying taxes? Maybe it was when he gratuitously insulted comedian Rosie O’Donnell? Or when he asserted that he had done African-Americans a great service by promoting the lie that President Obama had been born in Kenya? I watched the debate during a cross-country flight from Los Angeles to New York City, as did most of my fellow passengers, and every now and then a Trump statement or reaction that struck me as terribly stupid would be met elsewhere on the plane with vocal approbation. This, for me, was the strangest part of the evening: realizing that I was trapped in an airborne metal tube with people who were watching Trump flail, nodding to themselves, and saying, “This guy gets it.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Over the course of his madcap presidential campaign, Trump has done and said things that would have ended any other person’s political fortunes. Just in the past couple of months, he has insulted the parents of a decorated, fallen U.S. soldier, the speaker of the House of Representatives, the 2008 Republican candidate for president, and many others. He has urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email and repeatedly expressed his fondness for Russian president Vladimir Putin. He has asserted that President Obama is “literally” the founder of ISIS. And yet recent polling puts Trump inexplicably close to Hillary Clinton with a month to go.

Trump’s success is especially impressive given that he is the least focused major-party presidential candidate in modern American history. One moment he’s channeling Captain Ahab as he talks about his beloved border wall, the next he’s ranting about sex tapes, all with the discipline of a novice stand-up comedian who abandons his prepared routine to heckle the other comics on the bill. Yet these random salvos have resonated with disparate pockets of the Republican electorate, so much so that you have to think that Trump’s scattershot ranting is strategic—an attempt to unite a bloc composed of single-issue voters, some of whom have radically contradictory expectations of him.

Trump seems to speak in code, and when he is not signaling to racists, he is trying to please the other members of his coalition. I encountered this phenomenon firsthand while covering the Republican National Convention this summer. There I met an array of people who all saw Trump as the apotheosis of their very different individual obsessions. They have keyed on one specific aspect of Trump’s message and chosen to ignore the rest. (For our purposes here, let’s exclude folks motivated predominantly by racism, misogyny, homophobia, and sociopathy, whether or not they amount to more or less than half of Trump’s basket.) By standing for almost nothing specific, Trump becomes anything and everything that a voter might want him to be. This ideological plasticity has helped him attract a broad base of supporters; it also makes him look crazy to those who are steeped in traditional methods of politicking.

Over the past two weeks, I have found myself thinking back to my time in Cleveland, where I first started to fully grasp the contours and inconsistencies of the Trump coalition. On the third day of the convention, I spoke to a Trump supporter named James Bates whose comments captured the roots of the candidate’s appeal. “Everyone thought he was a laughingstock. They all said, ‘Oh, my God, this is a joke,’” Bates told me. “For what it’s worth, we’re looking at a new era. The people want a candidate that represents them.” As best I can tell, this is who “them” are.

The Prosperity Nostalgist

The first debate began with a rousing exchange on trade and the economy, and Trump scored early points when he criticized Clinton for her support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. “We have to do a much better job at keeping our jobs. And we have to do a much better job at giving companies incentives to build new companies or to expand, because they’re not doing it. And all you have to do is look at Michigan and look at Ohio and look at all of these places where so many of their jobs and their companies are just leaving, they’re gone,” said Trump, before turning to Clinton with a critique and a promise. “I will bring back jobs,” he vowed. “You can’t bring back jobs.”

With this sort of rhetoric, Trump is attempting to appeal to Prosperity Nostalgists, people yearning for a past when America still made stuff, dammit; when stable middle-class jobs still existed and NAFTA was the show that came on after CHiPs. “We need to increase economic growth so everybody benefits from it, from the top to the bottom and mostly in the middle, where we’re really hurting,” Arizona state representative David Livingston, an apparent Prosperity Nostalgist, told me on the floor of the convention.

Not long after, I was wandering around Freedom Plaza, a GOP-themed souvenir market in the concourse of the baseball stadium abutting the convention hall, when I was greeted by the friendly proprietor of a charm-jewelry stand. “How do I know you?” she asked, and when she realized that she knew me from my multiple stints as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, she became very excited and insisted on taking my picture twice.

Her name was Nancy Basch, and with her company, Lady Jayne Ltd., she creates and sells nickel-free charm jewelry. Her wares on display at Freedom Plaza hewed to appropriate themes of patriotism, conservatism, and hypoallergenicity. She spoke wistfully of a bygone era when Providence, Rhode Island, was the center of the trinket trade, a mecca for charm-jewelry craftsmanship. Today, she said, the industry has relocated to Hong Kong, and all the former artisans in Providence are broke and idle. “I’m a Trumpster,” she told me. “If you don’t vote for Trump, something’s wrong with you.”

But Prosperity Nostalgists can never explain why Trump is the man to restore American prosperity, other than citing his dubious credentials as an ostentatiously prosperous person. And they are not exactly sure what it would take to put the middle class back to work. “Bring back the companies, bring back the jobs back to this country,” Alirio Martinez, an alternate delegate from Germantown, Maryland, told me. “You can’t have prosperity without jobs,” I replied, trying to make sure I understood his point. “Right, so we need that back in here, and we need back truth, established principles, and values in this country, and take the regulation, and, um, low taxes,” he said.

Trump’s own plans for restoring American prosperity are just as confusing as Martinez’s description of them, but Prosperity Nostalgists don’t dwell on the inconsistencies. Instead they place their faith in Trump’s (disputable) personal wealth and reputation as a shrewd dealer, and assume that Trump’s vision for renewed American greatness involves applying the principles of his own (disputable) prosperity to the wider world.

The Effort Fetishist

Donald J. Trump loves to brag about his success in business, almost as much as he loves claiming that his success was wholly self-generated, which is sort of rich, considering the helping hand extended to him by his father, a wealthy real estate developer. At the first debate, Trump reiterated this incomplete meritocratic narrative. “I built an unbelievable company,” he said. “Some of the greatest assets anywhere in the world, real estate assets anywhere in the world, beyond the United States, in Europe, lots of different places. It’s an unbelievable company.”

This story is designed to appeal to the Effort Fetishist, the Trump supporter who believes that all the world’s problems would be fixed if only everyone else worked as hard as he did, and who carries himself as if forever resentful that his pathological self-reliance has not yet been recognized with a Congressional Medal of Honor. He prefers simple, self-valorizing stories—you get out of life what you put into it, the whole Horatio Alger thing—and, by extension, imputes sloth and weakness to those who are unable to bootstrap. Effort Fetishism implies that failure is a moral flaw, since the world is a flat surface free from nepotism, racism, and institutional bias. On the final night of the convention, Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, asserted that “when run correctly, a construction site is a true meritocracy.” Effort Fetishists love the idea of Making America a Meritocracy Again.

That same night, prowling the halls of Quicken Loans Arena, I met a dapper older man named Fred Jenkins, from Cumberland, Pennsylvania, who was wearing a creamy white suit. “What does prosperity mean to you?” I asked him, because he was clearly an accomplished fellow. “Prosperity is being able to, uh, have what you would like to have, and work for it,” he told me.

Each time I asked—“What does prosperity mean to you?”—I got many similar responses. “Prosperity means to me the ability to earn a living to the extent of my ability,” said Nevada delegate Christine DeCourt. “In order to prosper in this country, you have to work hard,” said New Hampshire state representative Eric Estevez. “I think that, uh, even though it may seem impossible, we still live in a great country, and you can do great things here if you’re willing to work hard.”

Effort Fetishism is a traditional Republican value, but it’s discordant with Trump, who also spends a great deal of time and effort trying to conceal evidence of his own incompetence, often by claiming that mistakes aren’t actually mistakes or deeming them someone else’s fault. In his first debate with Hillary Clinton, accused of stiffing an architect, Trump suggested that the man had done a bad job and, as such, did not deserve payment. “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” he said. “Which our country should do, too.”

The Motivated Yeller

My favorite part of the debate was when Trump repeated his line about how well suited he is to the highest office in the land. “I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament,” he told viewers. “I have a winning temperament.” This is sort of like a job seeker telling a potential employer that his strongest asset is his chronic tardiness. This temperament might suit a television host or a carnival barker, but it’s hard to see it playing well at a state dinner or a trade summit.

Still, Trump’s choleric flamboyance holds great appeal to a variety of supporter I’ve come to call the Motivated Yeller. These people treat politics as a performance and admire Trump’s theatricality. Motivated Yellers know that a crowd responds less to the script than to the delivery, that it’s not about what you say so much as the conviction with which you say it. They want a president who projects confidence and decisiveness, and also projects his voice, loudly, all the way to the back of the room. In Trump, they have found a leader who is as much of a ham as they are.

At the RNC, the Motivated Yellers had come in costume. At any given moment in Cleveland, approximately two out of five delegates were dressed as if they wanted to be prepared in case someone abruptly asked them to lead a parade. They came in seersucker suits, smart red blazers, frock coats, American-flag garb in infinite variations. (This has also been true of every convention I’ve ever attended.) At least two men were dressed as if they had just come from the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Well costumed, too, was Milo Yiannopoulos, the Twitter provocateur, who swept through Media Row on Wednesday as if auditioning for a bit part on Entourage, wearing sunglasses indoors, his hair dyed an ostentatious silver. That same week, Yiannopoulos had been banned from Twitter for harassing actress Leslie Jones. Trailed by a camera crew, Yiannopoulos barged into the Twitter kiosk in Media Row and demanded answers from the flummoxed staffers who were manning the booth. It was all for show, as is everything the Motivated Yeller does.

My favorite Motivated Yeller in Cleveland was Michelle Van Etten, who spoke on the third night and who seemed like she might dismiss Sarah Palin as “too brainy.” Van Etten—very tan, very blond, and entirely uninterested in hewing to the text of the speech on the teleprompter—runs a direct-sales supplement company in Florida. She began by telling a long story about her childhood stint as the proprietor of an itinerant underage circus. “I recruited the neighborhood kids to be part of my circus,” she bragged, and continued in this vein for a good four minutes before veering off script to rant about the horrors of Common Core. “The American dream. Is being. [long pause] Denigrated now,” she summarized, passionately, in true Motivated Yelling tradition.

That same night, I ran into the radio host Alex Jones, who is a Trump supporter and an accomplished Yeller himself. The theme of the day was Make America First Again, and I asked Jones to explain what that phrase meant to him. “I think before America can be great again, it must be free again, and be free-market, and have low taxes to allow innovation,” he said. “I think Trump is a lot better than Hillary trying to start a nuclear war with Russia, and so for peace and stability I support Donald Trump.” This answer had little to do with the question I asked, which perhaps was to be expected. Motivated Yellers don’t listen very well. They are too busy waiting for their cue to speak.

The Lovable Lemming

Trump loves to boast about how popular he is. “What she doesn’t say is that tens of thousands of people that are unbelievably happy and that love me,” Trump told moderator Lester Holt midway through the first debate. As further evidence of his popularity and belovedness, he cited his numbers. “I saw the polls come in today,” he said, “and I’m either winning or tied, and I’ve spent practically nothing.” (Shrewd dealer, he!) There are plenty of people out there who support Trump, it’s true, but you shouldn’t necessarily read love and affection into those numbers. There are lots of Trump voters who have only grudgingly decided to give him their support. I call these people Lovable Lemmings.

Trump’s constant poll touting is a way to shore up his coalition and convince skeptical supporters that they have made the right choice—to gild his candidacy with a sheen of inevitability and convince the Lemmings to stick with the herd. The Lovable Lemming is aware of Trump’s flaws as a candidate but has decided to support him anyway. Lovable Lemmings are often reasonable people and can be of any political persuasion. They have resigned themselves to Trump by conceding that, even if Trump is a monster, at least he’s their monster. My party, right or wrong is the gist of their oft dejected argument.

There were lots of Lovable Lemmings at the RNC. Failed presidential candidate and current Trump supporter Ben Carson, who giggled like a schoolgirl when I asked if he thought Trump would be the most luxurious president in American history, is one of them, I think. So, too, is fellow also-ran Mike Huckabee, who seems personable and pleasant despite his moralistic politics. Huckabee has explained his reason for joining the Trump coalition, and it’s a telling one. “When we nominated people over the past several election cycles, some of us had heartburn, but we stepped up and supported the nominee,” he said in May. “You’re either on the team or you’re not on the team.”

On the final night of the convention, a large man named Mike Lachs moved through the hallways of Quicken Loans Arena wearing a battered hat shaped like an elephant’s head. It was covered in buttons from political conventions past and present. He bought what he described as “this stupid hat” at the 1996 GOP convention in San Diego and had worn it to every convention since, adding new flair at each stop. “I’m just having fun,” he smiled. He was soft-spoken, expressing his anxieties about job security and the country’s financial future. I began to wonder how this thoughtful person had come to support Donald Trump.

Trump had not been his first choice. Lachs began the election cycle supporting John Kasich. “I’m a Republican,” he explained. “I’ve been involved with helping people in primaries—sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And when you lose, and it’s the other guy’s candidate, you know, that’s the way it works. I share more in common with that person than the Democrat.” The Lovable Lemming wants the GOP to win the election, even if victory means following an unstable leader off an entirely avoidable cliff.

The Insecure Isolationist

Midway through the debate, Trump had the chance to harp on one of his favorite topics: the extent to which America is being stiffed and cheated by almost every other country on earth. “Just to go down the list, we defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia, we defend countries,” said Trump. “They do not pay us. But they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service, and we’re losing a fortune.”

With this line of thought, Trump is trying to appeal to a species of supporter I have dubbed the Insecure Isolationist. These people are often deemed racist xenophobes, and perhaps they are, but I think it’s just as much the case that they are suspicious that other nations might be taking advantage of us. These people want America to stay at home and mind its own business, because otherwise it might be tricked by double-dealing foreigners. If they ever traveled overseas, which they probably would not, the Insecure Isolationists would be the ones wearing their money in belts under their shirts, frantically scanning the horizon for signs of pickpockets.

On one night of the convention, I fell into conversation with three Maryland men congregating around a malodorous garbage can in the concourse of Quicken Loans Arena. I asked what Make America First Again meant to them. “Reestablish the fact that we are a sovereign nation, that we understand that America comes first before we start dealing with… when we’re dealing with foreign nations,” said Wendell Beitzel, a delegate from Accident, Maryland. “America becomes first. Not secondary. We’re not running around the world trying to promote things that really are not good for America.”

Trump bolsters the Insecure Isolationist’s fears by constantly talking about how China and other nations are eating America’s lunch when it comes to trade deals, and by maligning the purported freeloader nations of NATO. (There might be some projection in play here since the nonpayment he decries is the exact same behavior he boasts of in his own business dealings.) He also stokes these fears by portraying foreign nationals as slavering malefactors. Trump was unexpectedly gracious at the first debate in that he didn’t spend much time at all gratuitously insulting Mexicans or Muslims, but he has done plenty of that in the past. The rhetoric has resonated with the Insecure Isolationists. “Look at what’s going on with ISIS and with the immigration issue, with, you know, flooding Europe, and look what they’re doing to Europe,” Beitzel told me. “And so that’s why we support Trump so strongly. He wants to put America’s interest first.”

The Team America: World Policeman

Almost immediately after implying during the first debate that he would withdraw America from its international commitments and pursue an “America first” policy, Trump also said that he would lead the world into battle against ISIS. “I think we have to get NATO to go into the Middle East with us, in addition to surrounding nations, and we have to knock the hell out of ISIS, and we have to do it fast, when ISIS formed in this vacuum created by Barack Obama and Secretary Clinton,” said Trump.

With this line of rhetoric, Trump is courting a strain of supporter I’ve christened the Team America: World Policeman. In sharp contrast to the Insecure Isolationist, the Team America: World Policeman wants the United States to be the greatest nation on earth and believes that greatness means global omnipresence. “Putting America first means we’re going to take a leadership role in the world. We’re going to take on the bad guys in the world, whether it be communist China or ISIS or radical Islam. We will fight them everywhere,” said Dwight Patel, an alternate delegate from Bethesda, Maryland. Echoed Arizona delegate Janine Kateff, “We’re going to be the country that is the strongest. We’re going to be the country that will be there to help the other countries that are in distress.”

Trump has encouraged the Team America: World Policeman to believe in his internationalist bona fides by constantly boasting of his worldwide real estate holdings and his long experience dealing with foreign leaders and dignitaries. (“He actually advocated for the actions we took in Libya and urged that Gaddhafi be taken out, after actually doing some business with him one time,” Clinton noted during the debate. And, indeed, appearing on Face the Nation in June, Trump bragged that “I made a lot of money with Gaddhafi.”) “We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS,” Trump vowed in his convention acceptance speech, and he left no doubt that he would do so unilaterally, if necessary. During the debate, after Clinton praised the virtues of working with America’s allies to maintain global security, Trump said that “we’ve been working with them for many years, and we have the greatest mess anyone’s ever seen.” Team America wants to clean up this mess with broad-shouldered American strength, and they see Trump—his isolationist tendencies notwithstanding—as the man for the job.

The Terrified Pedestrian

The second half of the first presidential debate touched on topics of national security, and Trump had a lot to say. “We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-Americans, Hispanics are living in hell,” he asserted. “You walk down the street, you get shot.” This line of rhetoric was meant to appeal to a type of supporter who spends very little or no time in the “inner city” but believes deeply that America’s streets are as dangerous as a battlefield.

It is folly to confront the Terrified Pedestrian with statistics on how, over the past few decades, America has become safer than ever, on how isolated incidents and a few rising-crime cities do not make a national safety crisis. The Terrified Pedestrian will vote for whichever candidate most vehemently speaks out in favor of good old-fashioned law and order. The Terrified Pedestrian would prefer if the president spoke loudly, carried a large and menacing stick, and used it as a truncheon.

There were plenty of Terrified Pedestrians at the RNC, and indeed, the entire convention apparatus seemed designed to heighten their paranoia. Above the highway leading into Cleveland, huge electronic signs urged motorists to vigilance: see something, say something / call rnc tip line / 1 800 call fbi. The city center was a maze of closed streets, metal barricades, fenced-off paths, and security checkpoints. The routes were guarded by scores of cops and federal agents sweating through their paramilitary attire, geared up to quash invading armies but reduced to dispensing directions to disoriented visitors. You could tell the Terrified Pedestrians by the way they loudly and pointedly thanked the officers for keeping them safe. It was mere days after police officers in Dallas had been targeted by a civilian sniper, but the praise was so lavish that it was almost as if these delegates wanted something to happen, wanted to see one of these officers overpower some rabid Code Pink protester so that they could film and upload the entire thing as evidence of the overwhelming dangers of daily life, as incontrovertible proof that Blue Lives Do Matter.

On the third night of the Republican National Convention, I ran into a middle-aged man conspicuously carrying a large hand-drawn sign reading cruz delegates for trump. His name was Nick Stepovich, and he was the proprietor of Soapy Smith’s Pioneer Restaurant in Fairbanks, Alaska. I asked Stepovich what the evening’s theme, Make America First Again, meant to him. (Soapy Smith, in case you were wondering, was a 19th-century grifter who was shot to death by vigilantes when he refused to return a bag of stolen gold.) “Well, it means to make us where we can hold our head up and walk safely anywhere in our own country,” he replied. “Right now there’s a safety issue, and you can’t argue with that one, you know?”

For months, Trump has been singing this tune with great success. On the second night of the RNC, in a video that played on the jumbo screen in the arena, a hollow-eyed Trump promised that, during his presidency, “we’re going to restore law and order—we have to restore, and quickly, law and order.” The crowd roared.

The T-Shirt Witticist

Near the end of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton brought up her opponent’s fondness for cruel insults. “One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest,” said Clinton. “He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina.” Rather than apologize, Trump subsequently doubled down on these insults, posting on Twitter that the woman in question was “disgusting” and alleging that she had once made a sex tape. While many voters might find this kind of rhetoric grotesque, it’s sure to win points with a type of Trump supporter I call the T-Shirt Witticist.

The T-Shirt Witticist uses crude humor and simple catchphrases to formulate and communicate his opinions. He thinks primarily in cheeky slogans and finds them clever no matter how shallow or stale. He is a cousin to the sports fan who cares less about poring over team statistics than about painting his face, going to the stadium, drinking 16 beers, and yelling insults until he is arrested. He is into politics for the excitement of it and in Trump he has found the most exciting candidate of them all. The T-Shirt Witticist is often the life of the party, but it is rarely a party that you’d want to attend.

Donald J. Trump isn’t just the T-Shirt Witticists’ candidate, he is a T-Shirt Witticist himself, a master of cloddish epigrammery. His incessant sloganeering has resounded with the T-Shirt Witticists of America because you can imagine everything he says on a shirt or a hat or a bumper sticker. “Rosie O’Donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her,” he said, and sure enough, his feud is already inspiring T-shirts.

The T-Shirt Witticist is terrified of encroaching political correctness. “We can’t afford to be so politically correct anymore!” Trump bellowed during his acceptance speech, to huge applause from the T-Shirt Witticists in the crowd. Political correctness encourages people to be sensitive to the effects of the things they might say, and this notion is anathema to the T-Shirt Witticist, who interprets the constitutional right to free speech as a mandate to be as abrasive as possible at every waking moment.

If the T-Shirt Witticist is capable of complex thoughts, he keeps them to himself. It’s one thing to say “I find Hillary Clinton unprincipled and untrustworthy, and here are the many reasons why.” It is easier to chant “Lock her up! Lock her up!” while wearing a shirt with a drawing of Donald Trump pushing Hillary Clinton from a motorcycle while himself wearing a T-shirt that says, if you can read this, the bitch fell off.

At times, the Trump campaign has seemed like little more than an excuse to make money selling novelty apparel. At the RNC, both inside and outside the convention grounds, you could barely walk ten feet without encountering an attitudinous T-shirt: girls just wanna have guns; god is great, beer is good, and liberals are crazy; i wish hillary had married oj. There were infinite variations on the make america great again slogan: make florida red again; make guns in america great again; make baseball fun again. Most popular were shirts demeaning or denouncing Hillary Clinton. One afternoon on my way into the convention, I ended up walking behind a young man in a T-shirt reading hillary for prison. This was a very popular slogan during the convention week, but T-Shirt Guy was nevertheless greeted as if he had coined the phrase himself. “Hillary for Prison?” one woman whooped. “I love you.”

I wanted to get in on the fun, so on the last night of the convention I arrived wearing a homemade T-shirt reading rich guv in trainig. (It was supposed to say rich guy in training, but I screwed up while making the shirt.) At the end of the night, a passing delegate paused, squinted, and then grabbed my coat and spread the lapels to get a closer look. I could see him parsing the words rich guv in trainig; I could sense him turning them over in his head. He removed his hands from the coat, looked me in the eye, and gave me a double thumbs-up. The T-Shirt Witticist sees what he wants to see in the slogans he encounters and doesn’t think too much about the motives behind them.

The Ambitious Panderer

Donald Trump is world-class name-dropper, and throughout his candidacy he has seemed eager to let the world know that certain renowned Republicans are indeed in his corner. “Mayor Giuliani is here,” he said during the first debate, referring to the former mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, who really ought to know better, and probably does. Giuliani is an Ambitious Panderer: a kissing cousin to the Lovable Lemming, yes, but the Ambitious Panderer is never lovable, insofar as he is clearly acting for his own personal gain. The Ambitious Panderer knows that Trump is unfit for the presidency; in many cases, the Ambitious Panderer has gone on record more than once saying as much. But that was long ago, and now the Ambitious Panderer has swallowed his or her objections and has boarded the Trump train because he sees something in it for himself.

A fantastically Ambitious Panderer is Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who caught my attention in Cleveland when he called the convention to order with a resounding THWOOMP! The noise was odd and alarming and sounded nothing like a gavel ought to sound. A gavel makes a thunk. It does not make a THWOOMP! It turned out that Priebus was striking his gavel on some sort of drum pad connected to the arena’s speaker system. Throughout the week, every time Priebus called the convention to order, he did so with this indecorous sound. With each amplified gavel strike, I was forced to recognize anew that our oldest extant political party is managed by a pandering factotum using a drum pad to call to order 10,000 costumed adults who have gathered to nominate a fearmongering narcissist for president. THWOOMP! is the official sound effect of Donald J. Trump’s loud and cacophonous presidential campaign—and, especially, of the Ambitious Panderers who have decided to get behind it.

In the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, had become Trump’s chief surrogate on the campaign trail, which makes him the Ambitious Panderer in Chief. Christie was the first of Trump’s primary rivals to endorse him. He had clearly hoped for the vice-presidential nomination. He did not get it, and to add insult to injury, the Trump campaign scheduled his convention speech for Tuesday night—which, in show-business terms, sort of made him the warm-up act for the warm-up act. When he took the stage, Christie, a former federal prosecutor, framed his speech as a mock trial of Hillary Clinton—a true Panderer’s move. Cataloging Clinton’s ostensible crimes and infractions in a call-and-response format, he would ask the audience to proclaim her guilt or innocence, and the crowd would shout “Guilty!” Occasionally, the delegates would break into a spontaneous “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Christie did not discourage this Motivated Yelling. “We’ll get to that,” he said with a grin. THWOOMP!

After Trump’s bizarre performance in the first debate, Priebus released a pandering statement in which he claimed that Trump showed himself to be “the only candidate in this race with the ideas to stimulate our economy, defeat radical Islamic terrorism, and keep our streets safe in every community.… Donald Trump showed tonight that he is the only candidate with the big-picture leadership our country needs.” The Ambitious Panderer’s inherent nihilism makes him the scariest archetype of all, insofar as he believes in nothing but his own advancement. As such, he will shift his beliefs and loyalty at will, as soon as he senses an advantage in doing so. And, Trump, of course, is the most Ambitious Panderer of them all.

Day One

Make America Wait Again

It’s the morning of the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention, and I am speeding down I-480. The free razor at the Super 8 was very dull, and as a result I gave myself an incomplete shave, with patches of hair remaining here and there, reminders that no matter how hard you try to succeed at something, sometimes you cannot help but fail. I keep this cheery message in mind, frantically and futilely scraping my chin with the razor. I am late for a 10:30 appointment to acquire my press credentials for the week. As I drive, I email my contact apologizing for my tardiness.

I arrive to find a long, lazy line of reporters trailing through the lobby of the Halle Building. “It’s a shit show,” a TV producer with a thick Boston accent announces. “There’s one person.” He gestures, with what seems to me like perverse glee, toward the room where a single RNC staffer is methodically dispensing passes for everyone credentialed through the Special Press Office. I rub my ragged face.

Every political convention I’ve ever attended has started like this: standing in a long line in a lobby or a hallway, watching enviously as the real reporters who work for places with “reputations” and “budgets” breeze in and out of well-appointed media lounges. The Special Press Office supervises those reporters whose employers are the Goonies of the political press corps. The man standing behind me carries a large roll of paper towels, which he uses frequently to blot his sweat. (It is not particularly hot in the lobby.) The man in front of me gives his trouser measurements to someone over the phone. “I’m a 33 waist. A 33 waist,” he reiterates, before pausing. “You might want to go 34.” The reporter in front of him appears to be in high school, and then it turns out that he is a correspondent for a children’s news agency. This information is greeted heartily by a jolly woman who starts to reminisce about her days as a staffer for a defunct outlet called Children’s Express.

The line moves very slowly. I’m not the only one to notice this. “She’s having a ten-minute conversation with everyone,” the sweaty guy behind me says, referring to the personable RNC staffer who does, indeed, seem to be really enjoying her one-on-one time with America’s least reputable reporters. “Just hand out the credentials!” Pants Guy gets off the phone and resumes a conversation with the kid journalist. “Congrats on getting a selfie with Trump!” Pants Guy tells him. “That’s huge.” After about 40 minutes, the RNC staffer emerges with a smile, an apology, and a promise to move faster. The ex–Children’s Express lady pulls her aside. “Question,” she says. “Do you have any comprehensive listing of what’s going on?”

I secure my credentials and parking pass. Next, it’s over to the 14th floor of the Carl B. Stokes Federal Court House Building to pick up another credential, one that has been vetted by the Secret Service. I arrive at 12:15 to find a small, frustrated group of reporters milling about in the lobby. No one is being allowed upstairs. Another tremendously sweaty and loudly unlunched TV producer named Carl, who is here to pick up credentials for a colleague named Jim, cannot decide whether to stay or go. He talks constantly on his cell phone: “Hey, Jim, it’s Carl.” “Hey, Jim, it’s Carl.” “Hey, Jim, it’s Carl.”

After a while, a U.S. marshal appears to inform us that the Secret Service didn’t expect all these reporters to show up today—I am not sure why this is coming as a surprise, but apparently it is—and they’re doing their best. “Bear with us,” the U.S. marshal says. “We’re not the bad guys.”

Finally, we’re allowed to go up to the 14th floor. “No cameras upstairs. All you need is your credentials to get you upstairs,” another U.S. marshal says. “And your belt for your pants.” Cell Phone Carl commiserates. “You’re herding cats. I appreciate your pain,” he says as he goes through security. “Oh! I forgot my belt.” Upstairs the wait continues, with more and more reporters arriving all the time, until there are 30 or 40 people in off-the-rack suits standing there, fidgeting, complaining. Cell Phone Carl sweats so profusely that he is dripping on me. “The NBA Finals were a breeze compared to this,” a local reporter says. “This is nuts.”

“I just did an interview from the bathroom,” announces a reporter from Indian Country News.

“Hey, Jim, it’s Carl.”

“The thing about all the people here is we don’t take no for an answer. We’ve heard it all before.”

We might not take no for an answer, we intrepid members of the political press corps, but we also spend a lot of time just standing and waiting. The best way to neutralize a political reporter is to make him stand in line, and today, at least, my colleagues and I will get no real reporting done. By the time I make it over to Quicken Loans Arena, and then to the Convention Center, it is about 3:45, just in time to witness a failed rebellion by an anti-Trump faction. Boarding the bus back to the arena, a community news reporter from Colorado accosts me. “Got any angles?” he asks, smiling. “I’m trying to find one.”

(Photo: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Day Two

Welcome to Asshole Alley

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East Fourth Street is the main artery leading from Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland to the entrance of Quicken Loans Arena. Inside, the Trump campaign is dealing with the aftermath of Melania’s speech. But outside the street are thronged with delegates, reporters, hawkers, protesters, lunatics, gadflies, and yelling enthusiasts. There are people playing instruments, people in costumes, people who want to share their theories about how the world works or doesn’t work, people who want you to read or purchase their novelty T-shirts. I call it Asshole Alley.

Political conventions are chockablock with folks who are just dying to be interviewed, and Asshole Alley is where the needy come to connect with the needier: reporters and cameramen in search of easy color and sound bites for their segments and stories. When I amble over, it’s about 3:45 in the afternoon, and it feels like it’s 95 degrees outside. I’m wearing a red velour jacket, which seemed like a good idea this morning but now feels like I’m being smothered by bordello curtains. “How in God’s name are you wearing a velour jacket on a day like this?” asks a man in a plaid shirt and khaki shorts. I’m making it work, I tell him. “You sure are!” he says and shakes my hand with great vigor.

We are standing outside the entrance to the secure perimeter, next to a loud and confusing face-off between three aggressively apocalyptic Christians and three liberal activists. The Christians tote long poles with black placards that read: “God Will Bring You to Judgment,” “REPENT (Turn from your Sin to Jesus),” “NOW is the DAY OF SALVATION.” Their leader wears a microphone attached to a bullhorn, through which he belligerently and loudly riffs on Bible verses. The activists try their best to drown him out, getting in his face and shrieking, “L-O-V-E! L-O-V-E!” One of them veers off-script and screams “Put down your Bible, speak from the heart, brother!” A flag-toting guy in a Trump 2016 shirt tries to get into the action, mean-mugging the activists and yelling “Hillary be gone! Hillary be gone!” at them, as if performing an exorcism.

The guy who remarked on my blazer approaches with an offer: “Would you be willing to part with the jacket?” I decline. “I had to ask, I had to ask.”

I head up the street, where a man and a woman hold tombstone-shaped signs above their heads reading “MRI? DO NOT DYE. Gadoliniumtoxicity.com.” Sensing my interest, or at least my attention, the man hands me a card directing me toward the afore-placarded website for more information. “We are sorry you had to seek out information about Gadolinium Toxicity, but we are glad you found us,” the website reads. The feeling is mutual.

About 40 feet from the gadolinium couple stands Zoltan Istvan, 43, the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, who along with a colleague holds a large banner bearing a likeness of his face. Istvan is a likable former journalist who has made his way into politics and now agitprop. What is the Transhumanist Party? “It’s like the Science Party, but the word transhumanist is more funky.” The Christian doomsayers come marching down the street, and Istvan steps in front of them to briefly impede their progress. “I had to do it, I had to do it,” he grins. How does it feel to hold up a gigantic banner with his own face on it? “Very weird. When I first started this, I couldn’t do it. It felt pretentious. But I learned.”

Farther down, Pittsburgh man Eric Saferstein stands in a referee-style shirt holding a small sign reading “Roger Goodell Hates my Guts!!! Learn Why.” I ask him to elaborate. “I want the NFL to tell people that they do not evacuate their stadiums via cell-phone messages,” he clarifies, handing me a business card that directs me to the website of the Artificially Generated Stampede Awareness Foundation. He says that he came to the RNC because there are a lot of bigwigs here, many of whom, he claims, are already aware of this issue: “It’s not rocket science.” Was the referee shirt a conscious choice or a coincidence? Saferstein laughs. “My mom gave me this!”

Saferstein isn’t crazy. The denizens of Asshole Alley understand the inherently performative nature of a political convention—and this convention in particular—but lack the status to actually get inside. There’s a street or district like this at every convention, but here in Cleveland the difference between the assholes on the outside and the ones in the arena is very, very slim. After nearly two hours in the scrum, I feel exhausted from a deep cognitive dissonance. The convention is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: the concentration of the media implies that something newsworthy is happening. Without the media there’s no news, as a revolt by the Alaska delegation would demonstrate a few hours later when it threatened to derail the TV broadcast of the speaking schedule. I am part of the problem. I am also hungry.

I join a friend for a meal in the middle of East Fourth Street, where we start talking to Glenn Rose, a retiree from San Diego who came to Cleveland with his wife on vacation. He arrived at 3 p.m., now he’s drinking a Sapporo and enjoying the show. “Trump is a turd,” he announces. “We just came to see all the crazy people.”

(Photo: AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Day Three

Exclusives: Rattata at the RNC, Michael Steele Shakes His Booty

Banal interviews are the lifeblood of America’s political conventions. Reporters ask politicians and celebrities to opine on the news of the day and treat those responses like gold nuggets. On Wednesday afternoon, I headed over to Media Row to conduct an experiment: Could I get “newsmakers” to say something “newsworthy”?

Media Row is on the second floor of a parking garage adjacent to Quicken Loans Arena. To call it a “row” isn’t quite accurate. It’s more of a warren of AV setups, card tables, and banners touting the names of various radio and television networks and programs: CNN, PBS’s NewsHour, EWTN News Nightly, The Joe Pass Show (“talk radio doesn’t have to be boring”), Ox in the Afternoon on KNSI (featuring “Ox-clusive campaign coverage”). All day politicians and dignitaries cycle in and out, sitting for interviews, getting free coffee and scones from the Google free-coffee-and-scones kiosk. If you want to talk to someone important about something important—or to someone vaguely famous about something really stupid—this is where you come.

As soon as I arrive I spy Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, getting up from an interview with some radio station. “Hey, Mr. Steele! Justin Peters from The Atavist Magazine. How do you think G.E. Smith is doing leading the band?”

“Leading the band?” says Steele. “Oh, the music has been kicking it. I love the music. The sound, the presentation of it, just some of the covers they’re doing. Just great, man. I’m loving it.”

We talk a bit about the music. “I think that a lot of delegates on the floor like it,” Steele says. “Someone joked to me: ‘There’s, like, no country music?’ You know, for a Republican convention, that’s a big deal.”

“There’s people who are dancing,” I say. “They were telling them to shake their booty last night, and people were complying.”

“And I want to let you know: I was shaking my booty,” Steele confers. This counts as a scoop.

Soon after Steele, I spy Ben Mankiewicz—best known to me as the guy who isn’t Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies—in glasses, stubble, swept-back longish hair, and rumpled suit. Mankiewicz is here with the talk show The Young Turks, but I don’t bother to ask him about that. Instead, I ask the question that the world wants to know: “What’s Robert Osborne like?”

“First of all, just what you’d think he’s like. Smart, and thoughtful, you know, meticulous. But we don’t see each other much, because we have the same schedule,” he says. “But let me tell you this: Everybody who works there—and they’ve been roughly the same people for twenty years at TCM—they revere him.”

There’s another television star in Media Row, too: Chris Soules, who starred in the 19th season of The Bachelor. Soules is young and tan and muscular and better dressed than almost everyone else here. I feel an immediate kinship with him, since I, too, was on a television program hosted by the dapper Chris Harrison (in addition to hosting The Bachelor, Harrison currently hosts Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, on which I appeared last year), and I, too, am better dressed than anyone else here. Soules is here to talk about ethanol, but instead I ask him something that only we television stars could understand: “What did you do with all the downtime on the show? There’s a lot of waiting in television. What did you guys do when you weren’t on camera?”

“Um, there wasn’t a lot of downtime, from the bachelor perspective,” he says. “But as a contestant you spend a lot of time just hanging out with the other contestants, and, you know, consuming alcoholic beverages and hanging out.” What’s his alcoholic beverage of choice backstage? “Um, you know, I’m a whiskey guy.” Yes, but what sort of whiskey? “I’m bourbon whiskey.” What’s his brand? “Bulleit.” That’s my brand, too! I erupt in cheers. We TV guys think alike.

There are loads of important-looking people around, but they move too fast for me to read their name tags. And most of them don’t even have name tags, which makes it even harder to tell who is and is not important. On the other end of the complex, next to the CNN free-coffee kiosk, I run into Ted Koppel, who doesn’t seem to have all that much to do, so I decide to ask him for some reporting advice. “I don’t know who anybody is,” I tell him. “Can you give me any tips?”

Koppel laughs. “I don’t know. I mean, the people I know, I suspect you would know, but they’re all over the age of 80.”

He laughs again, and I laugh, too, and try again with another question: “I’m not getting into any of the parties here. How do I do that? You’ve been to so many of these.”

“Well, that’s true,” Koppel acknowledges. “And all I can tell you is that after you’ve been to as many as I have… you’ll still be confused.”

I feel better. I devise a strategy for figuring out who people are. When I see someone being interviewed by someone else, I lurk in the background and listen to see if I can catch the interviewee’s name. Then I pounce. That’s how I snagged Sean Reyes, the attorney general of Utah, as he walked from one on-camera interview to another. Reyes is young, clad in a dark blue suit with a red tie. “Have you found any time to hang out with any other attorneys general while you’ve been here?”

“Yes, we actually have a booth with the Republican Attorneys General Association.” What do they talk about when they aren’t talking politics? “Pokémon. We just did a… I was teaching them all a little bit about Pokémon Go.” He pulls out his phone, on which the Pokémon Go app is already open, and points at a tiny avatar on the screen. “So right here, there’s a Rattata.” What is a Rattata? “It’s just a lower-level, annoying… rodent Pokémon. And I’m not doing well here trying to actually capture him.” Reyes is trying to maneuver the obnoxious rodent inside a floating red ball. He succeeds. What’s one thing he’d like the world to know about Pokémon Go? “Uh… fun, but be safe.”

Next, I wait ten minutes to ask former senator and frequent presidential candidate Rick Santorum a hard question: “Senator Santorum! What foodstuff from Pennsylvania doesn’t get enough attention?” I yell from behind him as he strides through the hallway, surrounded by a protective entourage. I get no answer. “Senator, answer the question!” I scream.

Right after that, I spy Kansas governor Sam Brownback finishing an interview with a television station. As the broadcast reporter concludes, I accost Brownback. “I’m with The Atavist Magazine. We’re a longform website,” I tell him. “What’s one perk about being governor that most people don’t know about that you think is sort of neat?” Brownback pauses for five confused seconds. “That’s… I don’t… I don’t know that I’ve ever been asked that question.” he says. “One perk that is…” His train of thought is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a smiling Rick Santorum, who bounds over to shake Brownback’s hand. “Ricky!” Brownback says as Santorum’s body man pushes his way between the governor and me, possibly to stop me from asking Santorum more questions about food. The two men talk for a minute or two, then they both walk away. And now the world will never know what Sam Brownback thinks is neat about being governor.

After three hours of asking the kinds of questions that other correspondents seem unwilling to ask, I finally understand just how hard it is to get anyone here at the RNC to say anything, let alone anything of substance. As I’m running out of steam, I spy Dan Rather, who doesn’t really have time to talk to me, but who is nevertheless gracious when I thrust my microphone in his face: “Dan Rather, I have one question. There’s a lot of kids out there who don’t have much self-esteem. What would you say to kids out there who don’t believe in themselves?”

Rather grabs my arm and responds very earnestly: “Believe. You gotta believe in yourself. I know sometimes it’s hard, and you can fall into a downward spiral of lack of self-esteem.” I think here about Rather’s own downward spiral, precipitated by his erroneous reporting in 2004 about George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, and I realize he knows of what he speaks. “But, you know: Believe. Have confidence. Dream. Put a polar star, a navigational star out, and go for it.”

I decide to take Rather’s advice and ask him the hard-to-verbalize question that is really the only one that matters at this convention. “One more question: How did this happen?”

A long pause. “You mean Trump?”

Yeah. Trump. How did Trump happen?

A shorter pause. “Well, one, it happened because he’s smart, he’s shrewd, he’s cunning, and he understands the power of the new digital era, particularly social media.” A beat. “Take care of yourself.”

(Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Day Four

The Most Luxurious President in History