Russians Are Terrified and Have Nowhere to Turn

Conscripted Russian men attending a farewell ceremony in Bataysk, Russia, on Monday.Credit...Arkady Budnitsky/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Ilia Krasilshchik NY Times

Mr. Krasilshchik runs Helpdesk.media, a website that offers advice and support to people affected by the actions of the Russian government.

“Hello, I have a pregnant wife and a mortgage. My wife is panicking, and I have no money to go abroad. How can I escape the draft?”

This is a message we received at Helpdesk.media, a website I and other journalists set up in June to help people — with information, legal advice and psychological support — affected by the actions of the Russian government. The writer, after completing his mandatory military service seven years ago, was being drafted into the war in Ukraine. The Russian government was not interested in who will pay the mortgage or take care of his pregnant wife. It simply wanted more fodder for its war.

In the days since Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization,” clearing the way for hundreds of thousands of men to be conscripted into his failing war effort, we’ve fielded tens of thousands of messages like these. Some were plaintive; others were defiant. Some were simply defeated. Along with Russians desperately trying to board flights, crossing borders or attacking recruitment centers, they testified to the same desire: to avoid the draft.

The truth is, they probably can’t. While presented as a limited measure affecting only those who previously served in the army, in practice, the government has free rein to conscript as many people as it wants. The initial number of 300,000, for example, already seems an enormous undercount. In the face of a monstrous regime hellbent on war and widespread international isolation, Russians are caught in a disaster. And judging from the response so far, they are terrified.

Such terror is at odds with the mass support the war supposedly enjoys. But the actual level of support is clearly significantly lower than that trumpeted by the Kremlin-controlled media. There are, tellingly, very few people eager to go to war — something made viscerally clear by the shooting of a recruitment officer in Siberia on Monday. Enthusiasm is thin on the ground: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a private military company and a businessman close to Mr. Putin, has resorted to recruiting from prisons.

For regular citizens who want to escape that hellish fate, there simply aren’t many options. Some people have crossed into Belarus, but we are already getting information that the Belarusian authorities, complicit with Mr. Putin, are planning to seize men from Russia. If not Belarus, where? Just days before the start of the mobilization, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland imposed an entry ban on almost all Russians. Last week, the Baltic States declared that this decision will not change, at least for now.

The thousand-mile border with Ukraine is, of course, closed. The Finnish authorities are still letting Russians in, but one needs a passport and a Schengen visa — something held by just a million Russians. Finland is planning to close the border, too. What remains open is Georgia, where the queue at the border crossing is more than 24 hours long and people are occasionally denied entry without any obvious reason. There are also destinations as far-flung as Norway, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Mongolia. Getting to any, by foot, bike or car, is a daunting undertaking with no assurance of success.

Airplane tickets to the few destinations still available to Russians, after the bulk of European airspace was closed off in February, are almost sold out. You want to fly to neighboring Kazakhstan? Here’s a ticket, with two layovers, for $20,000. Want to go to Armenia? No tickets left. Or to Georgia? Russia used to have daily direct flights to Tbilisi before the conflict in 2008, but now you cannot fly there, either.

The terrible truth is that Russians have become outcasts. Many countries have already imposed residency restrictions on them, and there are fewer and fewer possibilities of obtaining legal status, a work permit or even a bank account. No one is waiting to welcome fleeing Russians. In any case, it’s unclear how long the Russian authorities will allow people to leave the country. Some regional military authorities have already issued orders forbidding men who are subject to mobilization — that is, nearly all men — to leave their towns and cities.

People observing this horror from outside Russia are asking: Why don’t Russians protest? Well, many are. The first evening after the announcement was made, the Russian police detained over a thousand demonstrators in more than 30 cities across the country. Some protesters were severely beaten up. This is bravery beyond the imagining of those who have never experienced life in a dictatorship.

As for overthrowing Mr. Putin, likewise urged on Russians, I doubt you will find anyone who can tell you how to do it. The main opposition politician, Aleksei Navalny, is behind bars; protest is effectively outlawed; and even mild antiwar statements can land Russians in prison with a hefty sentence. I, for one, am facing criminal charges for writing on Instagram that the massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, was perpetrated by the Russian Army. For Russians, there is no visible route to a better future.

We have a saying in Russia, “to bomb Voronezh.” Voronezh is a Russian city not too far from the Ukrainian border, but the phrase does not refer to bombings by Ukraine. It refers to the Russian authorities’ perverse habit of retaliating against their own citizens in response to the actions of other governments. On Sept. 21, Mr. Putin added perhaps the most egregious example to the list. Thwarted by Ukraine’s resistance, he chose to punish Russian citizens for his failure.

Capital punishment may be forbidden in Russia. But for Mr. Putin’s decision, many people will pay with their lives.

 

Solo Soulless Saboteurs

MAUREEN DOWD NY Times

WASHINGTON — In the internet age, it’s almost impossible to get away with anything. (See: Adam Levine.)

And yet, some people still manage to pull off solo flights of destruction worthy of a megalomaniacal supervillain.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, long entwined, continue vile parallel paths: They would rather destroy their countries than admit they have lost.

They have each created a scrim of lies to justify lunatic personal ambition. And while it should be easy to see through these lies, both cult-of-personality leaders are able to con and bully enough people to remain puissant.

As our ancestors did, the Ukrainians are fighting an abusive overlord, against all odds, for democracy. It’s especially inspiring as a split screen with Trump and his MAGA forces trying to bulldoze democracy and rip away women’s rights. The Ukrainians are battling for a luminous ideal — unlike Trump and Putin, who are smashing a luminous ideal for their own benefit, driven by their dread of being called losers.

Both thugs are getting boxed in, Trump by a bouquet of investigations into his chicanery and Putin by an angry public pushback against his bloody vanity war.

America has its own history of lying itself into wars, in Vietnam and Iraq, for example, and then prolonging the killing of young soldiers as a sop to male politicians’ egos. Now it’s Russia’s turn.

Putin has doubled down on his unprovoked invasion of a neighbor — red-washed as a “special military operation” by the Kremlin. Now he has conscripted 300,000 men to join the front lines, commandeering school buses to drag the men to training camps — a move that sent draft-age men fleeing across the border and flocking to airports, amid tears and howls from women and children.

The Washington Post said that 1,300 people were arrested at protests across Russia on Wednesday and Thursday. The Times reported that anti-draft protesters blocked a highway during a protest in Dagestan in southern Russia.

“When we fought in 1941 to 1945, that was a war,” a man yelled in a video that went viral. “And now it’s not war, it’s politics.”

Pressured by allies and humiliated by his awful judgment in thinking that swallowing Ukraine would be a cakewalk, Putin seems ever more unhinged. The bodies of critics and oligarchs dying in “accidents” and “suicides” are piling up around him, like a scene in “Goodfellas.” He is ruining countless lives in concentric circles, from former friends to Russian citizens yanked into a war they don’t believe in, to Ukrainians willing to die for freedom.

George W. Bush thought he could see into Potee-Poot’s soul, and Hillary Clinton thought she could have a reset with him. But no one can deal with someone so inhumane.

On Friday, Russia began sham referendums in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine to decide whether the territories want to be incorporated into the Russian state.

Ominous in balaclavas and hoisting guns, Russian soldiers forcing reluctant Ukrainians to vote stood next to election workers in Ukraine in what The Times called “a legally bogus pretext to gobble up their country,” recalling staged votes in 2014 in Crimea.

Of course, the United Nations, where world leaders gathered this past week for the General Assembly, has been toothless as Russia has pursued an illegal war reeking with criminal actions. But the United States has sent repeated warnings to Russia about severe consequences if it uses nuclear weapons.

“As we assemble here,” Secretary of State Tony Blinken told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, “Ukrainian and international investigators continue to exhume bodies outside of Izyum, a city Russian forces controlled for six months before they were driven out by a Ukrainian counteroffensive. One site contains some 440 unmarked graves. A number of the bodies unearthed there so far reportedly show signs of torture, including one victim with broken arms and a rope around his neck.”

Both Putin and Trump are famous for accusing everyone else of their own sins.

Speaking at the U.N. on Thursday, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said, “We have no doubt that Ukraine has finally turned into a Nazi-style totalitarian state where standards of international humanitarian law are trampled underfoot with impunity.”

Trump also constantly projects. And now he’s using telepathy. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he did not stash any classified papers at Mar-a-Lago because he merely had to think about declassifying them and it would be done. The Wizard of Id.

Just when you thought he couldn’t go lower, Trump said “Hold my Diet Coke.” He shared an image of himself sporting a “Q” pin, for QAnon, and has been reposting more QAnon garbage on his store-brand social media site.

It would be poetic justice to think the walls were closing in on Putin and Trump at the same time, because at some point, all this will become unsustainable. Losers, refusing to admit defeat.

 

The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie

The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie

By Carlos Lozada The New York Times

Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.

Recent books like “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell” by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” by The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics. The big joke drains language of meaning, divorces action from responsibility and enables all manner of lies. “Getting the joke” means understanding that nothing you say need be true, that nobody expects it to be true — at least nobody in the know. “The truth of this scam, or ‘joke,’ was fully evident inside the club,” Leibovich writes. “We’re all friends here. Everyone knew the secret handshake, spoke the native language, and got the joke.”

Without the big joke, the big lie would not merit its adjective. Its challenge to democracy would be ephemeral, not existential.

The chroniclers of Donald Trump’s election lie typically seek out an origin story, a choose-your-own adventure that always leads to the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. In his book, “The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him. This, Lemire writes, was when “the seeds of the big lie had been planted.”

Tim Alberta of The Atlantic starts six months earlier, when Trump accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of cheating in the Iowa caucuses. “That episode was a bright red, blinking light foreshadowing everything that was to come,” Alberta told PBS Frontline. In “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” the Washington Post columnist (and my former colleague) Dana Milbank offers a far longer accumulation of lies from the right: The notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in the death of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, the illusions behind President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the birther concoctions, the death-panel ravings — all building toward the big one. “The G.O.P.’s quarter-century war on facts had come to this, a gargantuan fabrication aimed at discrediting democracy itself,” Milbank sums up. And Leibovich quotes Representative Adam Schiff’s view of how his House colleagues slowly submitted to Trump’s fantasies. “It’s one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse, until, you know, these folks that I admired and respected, because I believe that they believe what they were saying, had given themselves up so completely to Donald Trump.”

Such accounts reflect the common understanding that the big lie is really all the little lies we told along the way — a cycle of deceit and submission, culminating in a myth so powerful that it transcends belief and becomes a fully formed worldview. Lemire notes how Trump’s assertion that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign seemed like a pretty gargantuan lie at the time, one that Trump tweeted “without any evidence.” (Journalists love to note that the former president utters falsehoods “without evidence,” an adorable euphemism for “making stuff up.”) But even this one dissipates in the wake of the big lie. After “big,” the term “unprecedented” may be the election lie’s most common 

But it is not without precedent. After all, what was birtherism if not the same lie? Its underlying racism rendered the grotesque theory about Obama’s birthplace especially repugnant, but the basic assertion is familiar: that a president whom the American people lawfully chose is not legitimate, is something less than the real thing.

The 2020 election lie is not bigger than birtherism. History should not remember the effort to delegitimize Obama’s presidency as just another rung on the ladder toward the big lie. The lies are akin even in their power of persuasion. Leibovich recalls how in 2016, 72 percent of Republicans said they believed Trump’s lies about Obama’s background. This figure is comparable with the 71 percent of Republicans who said in late 2021 that they believed President Biden was not a fully legitimate president. And much as support for the 2020 election lie provides a loyalty test in the Trumpified Republican Party, a willingness to believe the worst of Obama was a near-requirement in the party during his presidency. “A testing ground for Republican squishiness was how strongly, and how bitterly, one opposed Obama,” the historian Nicole Hemmer recalls in her new book, “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” on the rise of the post-Reagan right. “To match the response of the party’s base, politicians would need to reflect the emotions gripping it.” And they did.

For Hemmer, the Republican Party’s evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who “fashioned grievance politics into an agenda,” she writes — a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds. For Milbank, it was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and the “savage politics he pioneered” in advance of the Republican Revolution of 1994. “There was nobody better at attacking, destroying, and undermining those in power,” Milbank writes. Gingrich made compromise a thought crime and labeled his opponents as sick and traitorous, tactics that should also sound familiar.

You needn’t pick between Buchanan and Gingrich — it’s enough to say that Buchanan gave the modern Republican Party its substance and Gingrich provided its style. (I imagine they’d both be honored by the distinctions.) When Trump dispatched his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, telling them to “fight like hell,” urging them to preserve a country that was slipping away, calling them patriots who could take back an election stolen by the radical left, he was channeling both men. The big lie is part of their legacy, too.

In his j’accuse-y yet semi-confessional “Why We Did It,” Miller, now a writer at large for the anti-Trump conservative forum The Bulwark, tries to grasp why his old colleagues followed Trump all the way to his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. “I needed to figure out where our parting had started,” he writes. Miller grasps the futility of seeking a single origin story — “I’m sure a student of history might be able to trace it back to the Southern Strategy or Lee Atwater or, hell, maybe even Mark Hanna (give him a Google),” Miller writes — but he does hazard some explanations. He points to Republicans’ ability to compartmentalize concerns about Trump. Their unquenchable compulsion to be in the mix. Their self-serving belief that they could channel dark arts for noble purposes. Their desire to make money. (Miller acknowledges his own paid work helping the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a stint that makes Miller more of a Barely Trumper than a Never Trumper.) Most of all, his old colleagues succumbed to Trump because they believed they were playing “some big game devoid of real-world consequences.”

Miller lingers on this game — the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results. He once thought of it as winning the race, being a killer, just a dishonest buck for a dishonest day’s work. “Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: ‘It’s all part of the Game,’” Miller writes. He has a nickname for the comrades so immersed in the game that they are oblivious to its consequences: the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. “The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless.”

The big lie thrives on LOL Nothing Matters.

What Miller calls “the game” becomes “the joke” in Leibovich’s book, the depressing tale of the high-level supplicants who surrounded Trump during his presidency and continue to grovel in what they hope will be an interregnum. If the purely transactional nature of Washington power was the subject of Leibovich’s 2013 best seller, “This Town,” the mix of mendacity and subservience behind every transaction is the theme of his latest work. Reince Priebus, during his incarnation as Republican National Committee chairman before his six-month sojourn as Trump’s White House chief of staff, explained to Leibovich that of course, he got the joke. “This was his way of reassuring me that he understood what was really happening beyond his surface niceties about unity, tolerance, grace, or the idea that Trump could ever ‘pivot,’” Leibovich writes. In other words, don’t take his words seriously. “He got the joke and knew that I did, too.”

The platonic ideal of the big joke was immortalized in The Washington Post the week after the 2020 election, uttered by an anonymous senior Republican official reflecting on Trump’s election claims. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.” It was wrong in so many ways — the downside would prove enormous, the believers would become legion, the plotting was underway.

The big lie is that the election was stolen; the big joke is that you can prolong that lie without consequence. The former is a quest for undeserved power; the latter is an evasion of well-deserved responsibility.

“There’s a stirring of Democratic hearts, a blooming of Democratic hopes, a belief that falling gas prices, key legislative accomplishments and concern about abortion rights equal a reprieve from the kind of midterm debacle that Democrats feared just a month or two ago.”

Frank Bruni, in a roundtable discussion with Molly Jong-Fast and Doug Sosnik, on Democrats’ chances in the coming midterms. Read the discussion.

“So this constant distilling into the ‘Big Lie’ overlooks something key: A sea change is slowly happening on the right as it relates to policy expectations.”

Rachel Bovard, in a roundtable discussion with Ross Douthat and Tim Miller on the future of the Republican Party. Read the discussion.

Other renditions of the big joke were more subtle. A few days after the election, a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the State Department was preparing to work with the Biden team to facilitate a “smooth transition” of power. “There will be a smooth transition,” Pompeo responded, making the slightest of pauses before adding, “to a second Trump administration.” He then chuckled, a possible signal that he was aware of the truth, and that he “hoped that perhaps everyone understood his position,” Leibovich writes.

Pompeo got the big joke about the big lie. Yet the man charged with representing American values to the world still felt he had to tell both.

Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republican House members to vote in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, says the joke is well understood among his party colleagues. “For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Kinzinger told Leibovich. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn’t even funny anymore.” Humoring Trump has grown humorless.

There was a time when even Trump grappled with the truth. Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as communications director in the Trump White House, told PBS’s “Frontline” that the president admitted defeat in the days after the election was called for Biden. “There was one moment where in this period he was watching Joe Biden on TV and says, ‘Can you believe I lost to this (blank) guy?’”

But what once may have sounded like a rhetorical lament — can you believe I lost? — now seems like a challenge to anyone questioning the big lie. Can you believe I lost? There is only one acceptable answer. In his rally last weekend in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump reiterated his commitment to the lie. “I ran twice. I won twice,” he declared. For a moment, when bragging about how many more votes he won in 2020 than in 2016, the veil almost fell. “We got 12 million more and we lost,” Trump said, before recovering. “We didn’t lose,” he continued. “We lost in their imagination.” It was a classic Trumpian projection: The lie is true and the truth is fake.

The big lie appeared to crescendo on Jan. 6, 2021. The big joke, however, was retold during the early hours of Jan. 7, when the election results were certified, with 147 Republican lawmakers — more than half of the total — having voted to overturn them. As Milbank puts it, “once you’ve unhitched yourself from the truth wagon, there’s no limit to the places you can visit.” You can use exaggerated warnings of voter fraud to justify state-level initiatives tightening ballot access. (Lemire warns that the big lie has “metastasized” from a rallying cry into the “cold, methodical process of legislation.”) You can select election deniers to carry the party banner in midterm contests. And yes, you can visit the Capitol on the day the voters’ will is being affirmed, trash the place and tell yourself, as the Republican National Committee suggested, that you’re engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”

The R.N.C.’s statement, part of a resolution censuring Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney for participating in the House’s Jan. 6 investigation, seemed to rebrand the assault as an exercise in civic virtue. The R.N.C. soon backtracked, professing that the resolution had not endorsed the violence at the Capitol.

In a perverse sense, though, the R.N.C. was right. Not about the rioters, but about the discourse. Political debate has become so degraded that it includes every kind of offense, be it anonymous officials humoring the former president, QAnon conspiracists exalting him or frenzied die-hards perpetrating violence on his behalf. Together, the big joke and the big lie have turned the nation’s political life into a dark comedy, one staged for the benefit of aggrieved supporters who, imagining that the performance is real and acting on that belief, become its only punchline.

Smoke from California Fires blanket Reno

Julie Brown, SFGATE

Southwesterly winds picked up over California’s Mosquito Fire on Tuesday, fanning flames and causing the fire to grow an additional 9,000 acres. Those winds sent a giant plume of smoke to communities east of the fire. Overnight, all that smoke settled north of Lake Tahoe, causing air pollution to spike in Truckee and Reno.

The smoke became so concentrated that air pollution reached hazardous levels in Reno on Wednesday morning.

The Air Quality Index in the Reno-Sparks area measured over 350 on Wednesday, prompting the Washoe County Health District to issue a Stage 3 Emergency Episode. The hazardous zone, which includes AQI readings above 300, marks pervasive air pollution conditions when “everyone is more likely to be affected,” according to AirNow.gov, an Environmental Protection Agency website tracking air quality across the US.

The surge of fire activity on Tuesday night caused smoke conditions to be worse than officials expected. On Wednesday morning, health officials elevated the emergency from Stage 2 to Stage 3, and most schools closed for the day because of the toxic air.

“The fire activity is the biggest curveball,” said Brendan Schneider, senior air quality specialist for Washoe County Health District. “If the models for today hold, we would expect similar air quality tomorrow. But with how rapidly it changed, it’s hard to really say even beyond today what can happen.”

Forecasts show the smoke pooling in Truckee and Nevada County, and then spilling over into the Reno-Sparks area, Schneider said.

“All communities on both sides of the Sierras are going to be impacted,” he said.

However, the smoke is hyper-localized, meaning it hasn’t spread to the entire Lake Tahoe region. It’s sticking to certain valleys and basins where smoke pools and then spills over to adjacent areas. That’s why air quality is hazardous in Reno today, but in the Lake Tahoe Basin, air quality is rated as “good” and the sky is blue.

The Washoe County School District said on Facebook there will be no instruction today in person or remotely for most of its schools, with the exception of schools in Incline Village and Gerlach, where the air quality is better. The school district is using a contingency day, already planned in the calendar for circumstances such as this. At the University of Nevada, Reno, and Truckee Meadows Community College, in-person classes are canceled today.

“Everyone should remain indoors and reduce activity,” the health district warned on Twitter. “Very unhealthy air quality is expected today with hazardous hours at times.”

Smoky skies and unhealthy air are becoming a normal part of life in Reno-Sparks, where smoke has impacted air quality for nine of the past 10 summers, Schneider said.

This past summer was actually a departure from the trend. Clear skies in July and August provided relief, especially compared with last year, when smoke from the Caldor Fire and Dixie Fire concentrated in the Reno-Sparks area and stayed here for nearly two months. Last year, the entire summer was impacted by toxic air.

Now, the smoke has returned.

“I think everyone in this area, it’s more of a, ‘here we go again,’” Schneider said. “This is something we’re almost used to at this point. So there is a different mental aspect to it, as well.”

Smoky, toxic air is known to cause severe impacts on physical health. Air pollution increases lung and heart disease. It also has a psychological impact. A study published in January found that wildfire smoke can cause anxiety and depression, among other mental health issues, especially for people who live in rural communities.

There are things people can do to lessen impacts of smoke on their health. Air purifiers and N95 masks help filter air. If you have to go outside in hazardous air conditions, Schneider recommended taking frequent breaks and staying hydrated.

Looking ahead, Schneider thinks the conditions will persist through the week, but the smoke forecast is entirely dependent on the Mosquito Fire.

The National Weather Service in Reno said winds are expected to strengthen over the weekend, with gusts up to 35 or 40 mph, which will impact the smoke, “for better or worse,” depending on location and fire activity.

One glimmer of hope: The forecast calls for a chance of showers early next week. With temperatures dropping, there’s even a chance for snow in the Sierra.

 

A Sensational Murder Trial in the Newly Founded New Yorker

In the mid-nineteen-twenties, a double murder in New Jersey became a media obsession, and helped define a fledgling magazine’s reporting and style.

By Joe Pompeo The New Yorker

A hundred years ago this week, on September 16, 1922, a young married man and his teen-age paramour discovered the bodies of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills on an abandoned farm near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Hall, wearing a dark suit and with a panama hat covering his face, had been shot once, the bullet piercing his right temple before exiting below the left ear. Mills, in a polka-dot dress and black stockings, had sustained three shots to the head and a gash that nearly severed her neck; maggots had already infested her remains. Someone had arranged the corpses beneath a crab-apple tree in a pose suggesting intimacy, then further guaranteed a scandal by placing the victims’ love letters between their bodies. Hall had been a prominent Episcopal minister and the husband of a blue-blooded wallpaper heiress with family ties to Johnson & Johnson; Mills, a working-class homemaker, was a soprano in the choir at his church—and the wife of the parish sexton.

Over the next couple of months, the slayings became a fixture on front pages across the country, making celebrities out of an eccentric cast of supporting characters: an oddball savant, a teen-age flapper, and a theatrical hog farmer, dubbed the Pig Woman, who lived near the site where the bodies were found. Despite the case’s notoriety, the initial investigation proved bumbling, and only after public interest intensified did the authorities turn their gaze to some of the most obvious suspects: Hall’s spurned widow and two of her closest male relatives. Prosecutors failed to persuade a grand jury to return any indictments, and readers moved on to new sensations, a specialty of the press in the boisterous nineteen-twenties.

Four years later, the Hall-Mills case roared back to life with the help of a nascent New York City newspaper, the Daily Mirror. An unapologetically down-market tabloid—“90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information”—the Mirror was William Randolph Hearst’s answer to the country’s premier tabloid, the wildly successful New York Daily News, which had been founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson. Hearst’s circulation-obsessed, politically connected tabloid general, Philip Alan Payne, saw an opportunity in the story, and assigned one of his best reporters to a secretive investigation, a project that produced enough dubious “evidence” to persuade New Jersey’s Democratic governor to reopen the case. In July of 1926, after the Mirror exposé flew off newsstands, Edward Hall’s widow, Frances, faced prosecution once again. This time, she wasn’t so lucky—a second grand jury decided that she, her two brothers, and a stockbroker cousin should face their day in court.

The Hall-Mills trial was to the Jazz Age what the O. J. Simpson case became seventy years later. (The former’s fame might have endured had the murders not been eclipsed, in 1932, by another New Jersey mega-crime, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son, from his crib on the second floor of a secluded mansion outside Princeton.) Throughout the summer and fall of 1926, hundreds of journalists—including stars such as Damon Runyon and Dorothy Dix—descended on New Brunswick, an hour’s train ride from Manhattan, and neighboring Somerville, where the trial would commence inside the Palladian-style Somerset County courthouse. The invading reporters booked up hotels and rented houses, making the trial big business for local landlords, business owners, and Prohibition-era purveyors of alcohol. The journalists’ work would occupy twenty-eight telegraph-switchboard operators and a bevy of mimeograph machines. Four court stenographers recorded the proceedings as a hundred and thirty reporters watched from three rows of hotly contested folding chairs.

Among the writers was an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old named Morris Markey, a tall, bespectacled reporter originally from Virginia. After serving in the First World War, Markey had cut his teeth at the Atlanta Journal before venturing to New York, where he entered the cutthroat newspaper market with jobs at the Daily News and the New York World. Now, as the trial in central New Jersey became a national obsession, Markey filed stories for a new publication with an entirely different sensibility: a one-year-old weekly magazine called The New Yorker.

I encountered Markey’s trial coverage during my research for “Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime,” published this week to mark the centenary of the murders. Markey’s dispatches from late 1926 offer not only a time capsule from a largely forgotten scandal but a snapshot of The New Yorker in its infancy. Founded the previous year by Harold Ross, its first editor, and his wife, Jane Grant, the magazine was beginning to arouse the curiosity of Manhattan’s intelligentsia, but still struggled to break through. In his memoir about The New Yorker’s early days, James Thurber would call the magazine “the outstanding flop of 1925 . . . and the only flop that kept on going.” (Thurber himself would revisit the Hall-Mills murders as part of a series of “Where Are They Now?” features, written under the pseudonym Jared L. Manley, in 1936 and 1937.) At the same time, The New Yorker was developing the hallmarks that distinguish it to this day. It was Markey, in fact, who established the rubric A Reporter at Large, which featured his trilogy of Hall-Mills pieces and continues nearly a century later.

The first of Markey’s reports, “A Mystery Revived,” appeared ahead of the trial, in the issue of August 7, 1926, and charted the resurrection of the case by Payne, whose tangled Mirror investigation involved a convoluted marriage annulment, a supposed secondhand confession, thousands of dollars in alleged hush money, a shady private detective, charges of witness tampering, and nearly a year’s worth of shoe leather to piece it all together. Markey’s account of Payne’s tabloid crusade oozed skepticism. “I came away from New Brunswick quite sure that the result of the present excitement, for all its midnight arrests and promise of coming sensations and new clues that wash ashore with every hour or two, will be precisely nothing,” Markey wrote. “Whatever is true, I believe that the authorities are quite as far at this moment from the conviction of the criminal as they were four years ago. I do not believe that the Mirror’s evidence is of any actual value, except of course as it serves the purposes of sensational journalism.” (In one of Markey’s earliest pieces for the magazine, from October, 1925, he had offered a sneering assessment of the “flaming rubbish” printed by the Mirror, and of the tabloids in general.)

Markey returned to central New Jersey to report a curtain-raiser, “The Rites of Justice,” shortly before the trial, which began on November 3rd. “It is the culmination of the most absorbing crime—considered qua crime—in American history,” he wrote. He continued:

It brings into public view for the first time the most curious and baffling figure connected with the episode, Mrs. Hall herself. It makes clear to us once more how far the men of the law will go to display their virtuosity when the limelight is upon them. And it gives us a new opportunity to observe the futility of pursuing justice when justice is involved with politics, and personal ambitions, and the amazing stubbornness of small town gossip.

Unlike the formulaic copy that filled the daily papers, Markey’s prose burst with attitude, wit, and literary élan, though he wryly acknowledged that his competitors weren’t without a certain appeal. “This trial is eminently worth following in the newspapers,” Markey advised. “Indeed, the citizen who permits himself to miss a single dispatch is punishing himself profoundly. The reporting of a trial, in the first place, is the one thing which newspapers do exceedingly well. . . . And my own recommendation is that you find which paper is printing the most of such matter, and follow it steadily.”

Markey’s final installment, “The Somerville Follies,” published during the latter half of the trial, took readers inside the courtroom. The article chronicles a day of questioning by the diminutive but pugnacious prosecutor Alexander Simpson, whose affiliation with New Jersey’s Democratic machine made him an enemy of the patrician Republican attorneys retained by the defense. Scene: “A hundred newspaper people” scribble away “furiously” as “telegraph messengers hover about,” Markey writes. Twelve jurymen, looking “bored and probably stupid,” are “tucked away in a corner,” across from a crowd of witnesses and lawyers. Three defendants sit “motionless” among their counsel, betraying not a hint of agitation. The “debonair” prosecutor “badgers” witnesses and “pounces” whenever his counterparts pipe up with objections.

There are hours of testimony, which at times seems to go around in circles. Then:

The day is gone—and one sits down to wonder what has happened. There is but one clear memory, at the last. And that is of a little knot of lawyers bickering and muttering among themselves. . . . One grows slightly dizzy, but hangs stubbornly to the notion that the modern murder trial, of which the Hall-Mills case is a singularly fine example, is something less than perfect as a means of establishing the guilt of accused men and women. But as a spectacle, an ironic spectacle, full of juicy chuckles, ah!

The trial came to its spectacular conclusion on December 3, 1926. (I won’t spoil the verdict here, but it triggered a lawsuit.) By then, Markey was busy with new assignments for A Reporter at Large, writing about Harlem’s African American jazz clubs and an exorbitant gala celebrating the birth of NBC. He continued to write for the magazine until 1941. Along the way, he published a celebrated book of itinerant reportage, called “This Country of Yours,” and tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting. During the Second World War, he served as a correspondent for other publications; he also authored several novels, the last of which he was working on when he died, unexpectedly, in July, 1950, at the age of fifty-one. Like Edward Hall, twenty-eight years earlier, he was found with a head wound from a small-calibre bullet. Discovered at home, in Virginia, Markey left behind a wife and a daughter. The killing stumped the coroner, the New York Times reported: “He issued an open verdict, declaring that his investigation had not produced enough evidence for a verdict of homicide, suicide, or accidental death.” Another puzzling mystery. ?

  

Queen Elizabeth II Loved Her Job

By Tina Brown NY TIMES

Ms. Brown is the author of “The Diana Chronicles” and “The Palace Papers.”

She died in her happy place. It was a photograph of herself and Prince Philip at Balmoral, wrapped in a tartan picnic blanket beside the hills of her beloved Loch Muick, that she chose to release on the eve of his funeral last year. Balmoral is where it is said he proposed to her and where, throughout her life, she spent contented summer months Un assailed, except by her own family.

I am told Her Majesty had made it quietly known that it was her hope she would die in Scotland and had increased the amount of time she spent there to better her chances. The woman who had given so much of her life to public duty was trying to ensure that her last moments were spent in the most private of her royal estates.

She planned well. The final days of her reign had a satisfying sense of completion. After making it through her Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne in June, she lived long enough to kiss off her 14th prime minister, Boris Johnson, and welcome her 15th to form Her Majesty’s government. From Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. One would love to know — and never will — what the privately astringent Queen Elizabeth thought about this particular arc of political history.

How we will miss not knowing what she thought! In a time when everyone has opinions, the queen adhered to the discipline of never revealing hers. However accomplished King Charles III turns out to be, he will never have his mother’s mystique because we know far too much about him. The queen was lucky to begin her reign in an era of press deference to the royals and smart enough to grant a formal interview only once, for a BBC documentary about the coronation. Her small talk to strangers was thrillingly pedestrian. When she pinned on my lapel the medal of the Commander of the British Empire for services to overseas journalism as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, I will forever remember what she said in the cut-glass tones of an everlasting British teatime. “So. Are you here now or over there?” “Over there, ma’am,” I replied. “Oh,” she said and moved to the next star-struck honoree, the author Timothy Garton Ash.

That perennial poker face of hers was strategic, a constitutional tool. As one of her former aides told me, “Because she spent her entire life being such a closed book, people project onto her whatever they want to become.” The aftermath of Diana’s death was a rare time the queen’s perfect pitch could not meet the hour. The emblematic role of monarch that she had been trained to play — simply to be — was suddenly not enough for a grieving nation demanding something she had never been required to show before: emotion.

The saving words in her reluctant television address acknowledging her wayward former daughter-in-law’s unique contribution were, “What I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.” The grandmother phrase was written by Downing Street.

The British public soon forgave her. There was never any serious movement in England during her reign to get rid of the monarchy. Standing above brawling partisan power, she alone could unite the nation in times of national joy or anxiety. During the challenging enforced separations of the pandemic, the contrast between the black-garbed queen, ever disciplined, always exemplary, achingly alone in the St. George’s Chapel pew at her husband’s Windsor funeral — and the lockdown rule-busting parties the day before at Boris Johnson’s 10 Downing Street — was an indelible, wordless moral rebuke.

Her televised address from her Covid bubble at Windsor immediately made her people feel safer. “We will meet again,” she said, evoking the World War II chanteuse Vera Lynn. As the last crowned head who served in uniform in that war — she learned to fix cars and trucks as a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service —D-Day anniversaries were still personal to the queen.

“She said she was immediately transported back to that time,” a former aide told me. “For her, it was a bunch of her friends on boats, landing on the beaches and pressing into France. And she had no idea whether she’d see them again.”

Without the queen, how will anyone know how to be British anymore? At the risk of sounding like Maggie Smith’s dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” she was the last well-behaved person in our coarsening, transactional world. Amid the clamor of ubiquitous narcissism, her cool refusal to impose her views or justify her choices was ineffably soothing. So were her routines, her dogs and horses and headscarves. You could tell the seasons by which palace or castle the queen was residing in during any given month: Sandringham for Christmas, Windsor in June. The queen was so grounded, her death has left us spinning in space.

A sustaining strength was her lifelong connection to the countryside. She fiercely protected her time with the passion of her life, her horses. Before her wedding toast for Charles and Camilla in 2005 at Windsor Castle, she disappeared into a side room to watch the Grand National horse race. Her best friend was her longtime racing manager, who died in 2001, the Earl of Carnarvon, known to his friends as Porchey. He used to call her in the afternoons from the bloodstock sales with the hot horse news. Animals were the queen’s true emotional peers. They had no interest in her rank, loved her for herself and never bored her by asking what Churchill was really like.

Offstage, the queen had a dry, drop-dead sense of irony, especially when asked to do something “relatable.” In a planning session for her Golden Jubilee, an aide asked if she would consider riding on the newly constructed Ferris wheel, the London Eye. “I am not a tourist,” I am told she replied. The reason she agreed to appear in a cameo with Daniel Craig as James Bond at the 2012 London Olympics was as a joke for her grandchildren. “Go, Granny!” an astonished Harry and William yelled from their seats as a stunt double dressed as the queen parachuted into the stadium followed by the queen herself behaving as if nothing had happened.

Elizabeth II never disappointed. Bailing out was not in her bloodstream. For the last nine months, the British nation has been in awe of how she struggled against ill health to continue to fulfill her duty in person and with the same imperturbable commitment. The fact that five days before her death, the tiny, infirm monarch even considered attending the Braemar Gathering, an annual hairy-kneed, kilt-whirling contest of tug of war and caber tossing, was, well, epic.

The queen herself never saw it that way. Sometimes missed in the paeans to her stoicism and physical stamina is how much Elizabeth II loved her job. She was the one member of the royal family (except perhaps Princess Anne) who did not find the relentless schedule of royal duties a mind-numbing chore. A former member of her staff told me that the queen adored anything to do with infrastructure, often fishing out invitations to open bridges and tunnels from her private secretaries’ “decline” pile. (Her grandmother Queen Mary, similarly dedicated to duty, once declared, “We are never tired and we all love hospitals.”) Elizabeth far preferred retreating to her study to read the government dispatches inside her famous daily red boxes to arbitrating the messy disputes of her unruly family, which she left to Prince Philip.

From the hesitant novice of her early years on the throne, the queen evolved into a great chief executive of the more than 1,000-year-old institution of the British monarchy. Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II. It turns out women are very good at this job. Thanks to the queen’s attentiveness to those red boxes and her keen interest in the minutiae of government, she was always rigorously prepared for her weekly audiences with the prime minister. A visiting dignitary who spoke to her shortly after the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in west London told me, “If she had been a cabinet officer, you would have considered her unusually well briefed.”

Her family was well aware of how she separated her dual roles as monarch and matriarch. Prince Harry told Oprah that the queen’s private secretary had headed off an agreed-upon visit to see her at Sandringham when he and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wished to step back from royal duties to simultaneously pursue commercial opportunities. But he clearly failed to understand what everyone else in the family absorbed from the cradle. Her advisers intervened only to provide Her Majesty with C.E.O. deniability. A catch-up chat with his grandmother was very different from an occasion where matters that affected Crown and Constitution would be discussed. The jolly tea Harry seemed to have imagined was replaced by what became known as “the Sandringham Summit,” called by the queen, who hosted Charles, then the Prince of Wales, both his sons and the senior aides to each of the four. It was a meeting in which her sovereign self, not her granny persona, was in control. “Megxit” became not a deal but an edict. There would be no stepping “back” for the Sussexes, only stepping down.

But usually it was the queen’s impeccable deployment of soft, or softer, power we saw, especially during her more than 250 foreign trips. The greatest political success of her reign was based on an apolitical expression of regret — her historic visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 when she spoke of “being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it.” Presiding for seven decades over shrinking dominions and her country’s diminishing world power, the queen was a master of the art of gracious retreats while preserving the aura of sovereignty. Some of the 2.5 billion people in the Commonwealth realms hoped for a more forthright acknowledgment of the lasting harms of colonialism. But for the queen, an apology for her country’s history would rank as a political statement she would not make. She has left it to her heirs to begin to address at last what Charles, in Barbados last year, called “the appalling atrocity of slavery.” In this instance, royal “regret” will never be enough.

It was the British monarchy’s extraordinary luck that the serious-minded, 25-year-old woman who became queen in 1952 possessed the unique properties of character to honor her youthful pledge to devote her life to the service of the nation. She had seen what the grave burdens of duty had cost her beloved father, George VI, who died a careworn 56.

In the months before the coronation, a four-year-old Prince Charles found his mother sitting at her desk wearing the headache-inducing Imperial State Crown, studded with 2,868 diamonds and a massive ruby the size of a hen’s egg, according to Anne Glenconner’s memoir, “Lady in Waiting.” The queen explained that the crown was very heavy, and she wanted to get used to wearing it. She understood the weight of the crown both literally and figuratively.

As the new king said in his poignant first address as monarch, his mother’s life of duty was “a promise with destiny kept.” She will be remembered now as Elizabeth the Steadfast, Elizabeth the Great. Perhaps the most telling sentence the young monarch ever uttered was her answer to the archbishop of Canterbury’s question at her coronation. “Madam, is Your Majesty willing to take the oath?” In her high, girlish voice, she replied, “I am willing.”

Tina Brown is the author of “The Diana Chronicles” and “The Palace Papers.”

 

A Hawkish Diplomat Takes Control

A Hawkish Diplomat Takes Control, Facing Hard Times and Johnson’s Ghost

Coming to power during the worst economic crisis since the Thatcher era, Liz Truss will need all her ideological dexterity — some call it opportunism — to succeed.

By Mark Landler NY TIMES

LONDON — In 1994, a passionate 19-year-old Oxford student, Elizabeth Truss, called for a referendum to abolish the British monarchy, telling an audience of fellow Liberal Democrats, “We do not believe that people should be born to rule.”

On Tuesday, Ms. Truss will travel to a Scottish castle to be anointed by Queen Elizabeth II as Britain’s new prime minister, completing a political odyssey from rabble-rousing republican to tradition-cloaked leader of the Conservative Party.

Ms. Truss, now 47 and known as Liz, long ago pivoted to embrace the monarchy as being good for British democracy, just as she long ago abandoned the Liberal Democrats for the Conservatives. More recently, she switched sides on Brexit, opposing the drive for Britain to leave the European Union before the 2016 referendum, then reversing course to become one of its most ardent evangelists.

Her ideological dexterity — critics would call it opportunism — has helped propel Ms. Truss to the pinnacle of British politics. How well it will prepare her for the rigors of the job is another question, given the dire economic trends enveloping the country, and a Tory party that seems torn between desire for a fresh start and regret about tossing out her flamboyant, larger-than-life predecessor, Boris Johnson.

Supporters cheering on Ms. Truss at a campaign event in Manchester, England, in August. Her message centered on lower taxes and smaller government.Credit...Molly Darlington/Reuters

By her own admission, Ms. Truss has little of Mr. Johnson’s charisma. Awkward where he is easygoing, staccato where he is smooth, she nevertheless scaled the party’s ranks with what colleagues describe as nerve, drive and an appetite for disruptive politics. When Mr. Johnson fell into trouble last year, she positioned herself adroitly, never publicly breaking with him while burnishing her leadership credentials as a hawkish foreign secretary.

“She has so much confidence in her instincts,” said Marc Stears, a political scientist who tutored Ms. Truss when she was at Oxford. “She is willing to take risks and say the kinds of things that other people aren’t willing to say. Sometimes, that works for her; other times, it hurts her.”

Ms. Truss will need all her instincts and agility to navigate the job she is inheriting from Mr. Johnson. Drummed out of office by his party’s lawmakers after a string of scandals, he has left behind a daunting pile of problems, not unlike those that confronted Margaret Thatcher when she became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979 during a previous period of economic hardship.

Ms. Truss has modeled herself on Thatcher, posing on a tank like her heroine once did in West Germany and wearing silk pussy-bow blouses, a staple of the Thatcher wardrobe. But her politics more closely resemble those of another hero of the right, Ronald Reagan: a clarion call for lower taxes and smaller government, coupled with a celebration of post-Brexit Britain as an “aspiration nation.”

That message appealed to the 160,000 or so mostly white and mostly aging members of the Conservative Party, who chose it over the hard truths offered by her opponent, Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer. Now, she will have to pivot yet again, to lead a diverse, divided country facing its worst economic news in a generation.

Ms. Truss has modeled herself after Margaret Thatcher, but her politics in some ways more closely resemble those of another hero of the right, Ronald Reagan.Credit...Helmuth Lohmann/Associated Press

“One of the things that has benefited Liz Truss is that she’s tribal,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research institute in London. “She’s very willing to embrace everything about a team. The trouble with being a team player is she now needs to define the agenda.”

Born in 1975, four years before Thatcher took power, Ms. Truss grew up in an avowedly left-wing family, with a father who was a mathematician and a mother who was a teacher and nurse. She talks often of going to a public high school in the hard-knocks city of Leeds, which she said “let down” its students with low expectations, little opportunity and a local council caught in the grip of political correctness.

Turmoil at Downing Street. Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson said he would step down less than three years after a landslide election victory, following a series of scandals that have ensnared his government. Here’s what led to this:

The Pincher case. Mr. Johnson’s downfall is connected with the resignation of Chris Pincher, a Conservative deputy chief whip, after he admitted to having groped two men. Outrage grew as it was revealed that Mr. Johnson was aware of prior sexual misconduct allegations against him when he appointed him; the prime minister had previously denied knowing about the accusations.

A wave of resignations. The revelations prompted the unexpected resignation of two of Mr. Johnson’s highest-ranking ministers — the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and the health secretary, Sajid Javid. That was followed by a flurry of resignations of other ministers and officials, capped by Mr. Johnson’s decision to step down.

The ‘Partygate’ scandal. Since late last year, Mr. Johnson had been grappling with reports about parties he attended in Downing Street while Covid lockdown rules were in force. An internal inquiry found that 83 people violated the rules at parties, and the police imposed hundreds of fines, including one on Mr. Johnson, for breaches of social distancing. Mr. Johnson survived a no-confidence vote triggered by the scandal, but was left reeling politically.

Other scandals. The prime minister’s reputation had also been tarnished by his staunch defense of a Conservative lawmaker for violating lobbying rules, his government’s contentious plans to change the system that investigated that lawmaker and the costly refurbishment of his apartment at No. 10 Downing Street, for which he secretly used funds from a Conservative Party donor.

Some of her contemporaries dispute her account of her school days. They note that she grew up in a comfortable district of the city that long voted Conservative. They also accuse her of slighting her teachers, who helped her gain admission — after a year living in Canada with her family — to Merton College, one of the most academically rigorous of the Oxford colleges.

At Oxford, Ms. Truss studied philosophy, politics and economics, an elite degree program that has produced a club of prominent politicians, including a former prime minister, David Cameron. Some have criticized the program for putting a premium on being smooth-talking and a quick study. But Mr. Stears said Ms. Truss did not conform to the cliché of a P.P.E. student.

“Her particular skill was not to master a brief or be glib or facile, but to come up with something unexpected,” he said. “Every piece of work she came up with was provocative. She revels in controversy and provoking people.”

Politics drew her early, and Ms. Truss became president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats, where she campaigned to legalize marijuana. Soon after graduating in 1996, however, she switched to the Conservatives, a party then careering into the political wilderness. She worked in the private sector, for the energy giant Shell and for Cable & Wireless, qualifying as a chartered accountant.

In 2000, Ms. Truss married Hugh O’Leary, an accountant she met at a party conference and with whom she now has two daughters. Her personal life briefly threatened her career in 2005, after she had an extramarital relationship with a married member of Parliament, Mark Field, whom the party had appointed as her political mentor. Mr. Field’s marriage broke up; Ms. Truss’s survived.

Elected to Parliament in 2010 as a member for South West Norfolk, Ms. Truss went on to hold six ministerial jobs under three Conservative prime ministers. Her track record, people who know her said, was mixed, and she struggled with public speaking.

While serving as environment secretary in 2014, she was widely mocked for a speech in which she lightly noted that Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese, then switched to a scowl and added portentously, “That is a disgrace!”

She was more persuasive in campaigning against Britain’s exit from the European Union. Speaking to a food and beverage industry group, Ms. Truss said, “I think the British people are sensible people. They understand fundamentally that economically, Britain will be better off staying in a reformed E.U.”

After the 2016 vote, Ms. Truss reversed course to become a Brexit cheerleader. “I was wrong, and I am prepared to admit I was wrong,” she said recently, contending that the warnings about the calamitous effects of Brexit had been overblown and that it had, in fact, unleashed benefits.

While few fault Ms. Truss for her youthful switch from Liberal Democrat to Tory, many criticize her retroactive endorsement of Brexit. “That’s not a serious answer,” said Ms. Rutter of U.K. in a Changing Europe. “The evidence is mounting up that if you make trade with your biggest trading partner more difficult, it hurts your economy.”

The U-turn did not hinder her career. Ms. Truss cycled through jobs in the Justice Department and the Treasury before Mr. Johnson named her international trade minister in 2019. She roamed the world, signing post-Brexit trade agreements with Japan, Australia and other countries. Analysts noted they were largely cut-and-paste versions of European Union deals, but she reaped the publicity.

“Very early on, it appeared to me that she was a likely candidate for prime minister,” said Robert E. Lighthizer, who opened talks on a trans-Atlantic deal with Ms. Truss as President Donald J. Trump’s trade representative.

Along the way, Ms. Truss expressed a fascination with disruptive forces, like the ride-hailing service Uber. She once posted on Twitter that the younger generation of Britons were “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters.”

“She’s been very keen to define herself as a disrupter and to make a link from that to a political approach that would benefit the country,” said Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, the London research institution. “There is something refreshing about that, as well as obviously a danger.”

Like Thatcher, she also presents herself as a fierce defender of Western democracy. Elevated to foreign secretary in 2021, Ms. Truss outflanked even Mr. Johnson in her hard line against Russia. “Putin must lose in Ukraine,” she declared last March during a visit to Lithuania. She held a famously icy meeting on the eve of the war with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

Ms. Truss, colleagues say, will relish the prospect of facing off against Mr. Putin. But some predict her bigger nemesis will be Mr. Johnson. Ambitious and still popular with the Tory grass roots, he is likely to remain a news-making fixture — one who could taunt Ms. Truss from the backbenches of Parliament or in a newspaper column, according to Gavin Barwell, who served as chief of staff to Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May.

“He’s going to be like Banquo’s ghost,” Mr. Barwell said, referring to the apparition who tormented Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “The moment she gets into political difficulty, there’s going to be a bring-back-Boris movement.”