The Confounding Politics of Camping in America

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it.

By Dan Piepenbring The New Yorker

A recent book by the historian Phoebe S. K. Young explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity.Illustration by Sally Deng

By the eighteen-seventies, the society pages of Scribner’s Monthly could no longer hide it: the “American pleasure-seeking public” had run out of places to seek their pleasure. Summer after summer, vacationers resigned themselves to “broiling in a roadside farm-house” among the “odor of piggery and soap-suds.” Or they visited costly resort towns, finding “more anxious swarming crowds than those left behind.” For solitude on a shoestring, Scribner’s suggested an exotic last recourse—a retreat into nature with only a tent and modest provisions. “We mean camping out,” the magazine wrote, as if to cue an awed gasp. Such a pastime would appeal to those with “a lucky drop of vagabond blood in their veins.”

Just a drop would do, though. Early campers didn’t wish to be mistaken for actual vagabonds, and the line between the two was easily smudged. In 1884, Samuel June Barrows, an outdoors enthusiast and, later, a one-term congressman, warned that a traveller carrying a “motley array of bedding, boxes, bags, and bundles” might arouse “suspicions of vagrancy”; to distinguish oneself from the riffraff, it was best to pack a “de luxe” tent and fashionable attire. Barrows’s anxiety underscored the contradictions of recreational camping, which he described as “a luxurious state of privation.” One of its luxuries was that it was temporary. In the name of leisure, well-heeled campers sought out the same conditions that, in other contexts, they condemned as uncivilized, unsanitary, or criminal.

In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.

As Barrows slept beneath the stars, countless workers were forced to do the same. In the eighteen-seventies, a boom-and-bust economy and a burgeoning network of railroads compelled laborers to crisscross the nation, following the cycles of the market. The “tramp problem” vexed those of means. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the ruthless, union-busting Pinkerton National Detective Agency, blamed the Civil War for giving men a taste of “the lazy habits of camp-life.” In 1878’s “Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives,” Pinkerton detailed the “grotesque company” tramps kept by moonlight, writing that debauchees would doze “in a stupid sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experiences.” Scarier than the encampments was the fear that some Americans might find them appealing, retreating from society to enjoy “the genuine pleasure of the road.”

The travel industry soon recognized those pleasures by making tramping an aesthetic, something that campers could slip into and shuck off as they pleased. A writer for Outing, a magazine aimed at moneyed outdoorsmen, preferred to “rough it in the most approved ‘tramp’ style—to abjure boiled shirts and feather beds and dainty food, and even good grammar.” As Young points out, the quotation marks around “tramp” raised a barricade between the imitation and the original. Real tramps led a precarious existence, subject to arrest, surveillance, poverty, and ostracism. When élite campers wore their costume, they shrugged at a world in which, as Pinkerton wrote, “a man may be eminent to-day and tomorrow a tramp.”

The double standard was especially glaring in Native communities. White Americans, including Barrows, saw tribal settlements as the epitome of savagery. The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs hoped that Native populations would disavow their “barbarous life” and take up “a distaste for the camp-fire.” Such goals were presented as matters of public health, but the message diverged sharply depending on the audience. Although Native groups “learned that the only way to prevent consumption was to give up camp life,” Young writes, “recreational campers read that exposure to fresh air and sunlight” could cure the illness. The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. Meanwhile, Outing, as it had with tramps, presented Indianness as an identity to be adopted and discarded on a camper’s whim. One contributor confessed that summer gave him “an irresistible desire” to “live the life of a savage in all of its most primitive simplicity.”

In the early twentieth century, the automobile allowed legions of new drivers to flock to the countryside. Camping shed some of its élitist pretensions, but its popularity exposed new rifts. Eager for traffic, many towns constructed no-frills auto camps at their outskirts, where entry was often free, at least until the camps attracted hordes of families and their Model Ts. These “tin-can” tourists, as Sunset magazine called them, ate canned food heated on the engine—or, more boldly, by a camp stove connected to the exhaust pipe. Camps couldn’t keep such people away; now that the backcountry, or even the frontcountry, was within reach, Americans intended to pitch their tents wherever they could. From 1910 to 1920, national parks and monuments saw a fivefold increase in visitors, reaching a million a year; by 1930, that figure had jumped to more than three million. The deluge was unmanageable. In addition to arresting vistas and pristine forests, campers expected generous amenities—firewood, electric lights, running water, garbage collection—and they were not in the habit of leaving nature as they found it. California’s redwoods, in particular, were so frequently, heedlessly beheld that their roots began to choke underfoot.

To save the trees, Emilio Meinecke, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, conceived a template still in use today: a one-way loop road with short “garage-spurs,” each of which functioned as parking for a designated campsite. By presenting campers with private, manicured spaces, Meinecke hoped to spare the surrounding plant life, reminding visitors that they were “guests of the nation.” Intentionally or not, his campsites had the flavor of the suburbs—the land, once for farming, was now to be savored as a consumer, and every family had its plot. The New Deal funded the “Meineckizing” of almost ninety thousand acres of federal campgrounds, about half of which were new, signalling the rise of what Young calls “the campers’ republic.” “Mixing leisure with nature,” she writes, “became a potent way for citizens to demonstrate national belonging.”

But all was not well in the republic. The Great Depression had pushed record numbers of Americans into homelessness: by one estimate, during one day in the spring of 1933, a million and a half people were sleeping outside or in public shelters, and the actual number was likely higher. Because camping was so popular, budget-minded vacationers were sometimes cheek by jowl with the down-and-out. Who could say which was which? Manufacturers of camping trailers went out of their way to disclaim the use of their products as “a permanent address.” Others argued that campgrounds were too affordable or unsupervised. In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, never one for understatement, alleged that roadside tourist camps had become “dens of vice and corruption” for “gangs of desperados.” Even Meinecke, for all his talk of hospitality, did not look kindly on extended stays at national parks. In an internal report, he complained that some visitors, “evidently camped for a long time,” had given one of his campsites a “ ‘used,’ second-hand look,” spoiling it for “decent people who are not slum-minded.”

Black visitors, too, found that the ordinary recreational privileges did not apply to them. The National Park Service couldn’t fathom how to attend to the needs of African Americans, so it simply dissuaded them from coming. “While we can not openly discriminate against them,” the minutes of a 1922 conference read, “they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care of them.” The numbers of Black visitors were low, which the N.P.S. took to mean that Black people had no interest in going; in fact, it was evidence that the agency’s deterrents had been effective. If there was wariness among Black communities on the subject of camping, it was, Young notes, well deserved: Black travellers had often been forced to camp in degrading conditions when inns and hotels refused to host them. Like many New Deal agencies, the N.P.S. was obligated to welcome all Americans equally, but parks in Southern states deferred to “local custom,” building segregated bathrooms, campgrounds, and picnic areas. When this policy was finally reversed, in the nineteen-forties, some Southern workers used just enough paint to cover the signs for “Negro Areas” without making them illegible. The discrimination remained, thinly veiled.

If the U.S. has dithered about the basics of camping—who can do it, where, and for how long—it’s been outright bewildered by camping as political speech. Could anyone have a message so urgent that it can be delivered only by sleeping outdoors? The answer is yes, as thousands of protesters have made clear, but the government has seldom taken them at their word, instead casting them as devious freeloaders or closet indigents. Occupy Wall Street, which famously enjoined its participants to bring tents, honed an approach popularized after the Civil War, when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ group, camped near the Washington Monument to raise awareness of their sacrifices. In 1932, the Bonus Army—thousands of out-of-work veterans seeking their service bonuses—followed suit, encamping in plain view of the Capitol. For weeks, the public debated whether the soldiers were heroes or hobos. President Herbert Hoover, deciding on the latter, ordered the clearing of the camps, resulting in a fiery conflict that claimed at least one life.

But a tent makes a forceful statement: someone is here, and that someone intends to stay. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to show Washington the true toll of poverty, they decided that camping was the only suitable action. The Poor People’s Campaign brought more than two thousand people to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in May, 1968, a month after King’s assassination. Known as Resurrection City, the encampment lasted for six weeks, drawing support and ire. A concerned citizen wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson that “a hoard [sic] of locusts” was abusing “hallowed ground.” Calvin Trillin, writing for this magazine, noted the irony: the poor had intended to show America that they were “sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless.” By June 24th, the camp had dwindled to five hundred, and police fired tear gas to expel those remaining. A demonstration about homelessness, it seemed, was no different than homelessness itself.

Just three years later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began planning to camp near the Capitol, and the Nixon Administration, fearing a repeat of Resurrection City, refused to give them a permit. The V.V.A.W. requested a stay on the ban, and the case went to court. Determining the legality of protest encampments, Young writes, “required finding an elusive balance between Constitutional freedoms and public safety.” The N.P.S. would allow only a “simulated” camp on federal grounds: no fires, no tents. John Kerry, who argued for the V.V.A.W., maintained that a real campsite was the only way to “tell our story to the people of this country.” The judge hearing the case, meanwhile, felt that to camp was essentially to sleep and was an act that couldn’t “express a single idea”—and that couldn’t claim First Amendment protection. He upheld the camping ban; the Court of Appeals reversed it; the Supreme Court reinstated it. The V.V.A.W. decided to camp anyway, and, not wanting a public-relations disaster, Nixon let them be. The Washington Post quoted a Park Police officer who, looking over a National Mall clotted with sleeping bags, waxed philosophical: “What’s the definition of camping? You tell me. I don’t know.”

The ensuing decades did little to answer that question. By 2012, Congress was holding hearings on the subject, in which Trey Gowdy, a House member from South Carolina, grilled Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the N.P.S at the time. “What is the definition of camping?” Gowdy demanded. Occupy D.C. had been staying in McPherson Square, in downtown Washington, for months, and Jarvis had been reluctant to say that the protesters were camping—their actions were a means to an end, not the end itself, which was reason enough to avoid enforcing the N.P.S. ban. Gowdy seemed to understand the Occupiers as recreational campers in disguise; their politics were a cover story for a good time, and taxpayers were footing the bill. But the Occupiers emphasized that they weren’t camping at all. (“WE ARE NOT CAMPING,” signs on their tents read.) Campers slept outside for the joy of it; Occupiers wanted “a redress of grievances.” Gowdy couldn’t compute how people camping “for fun” were permitted only in certain areas, while those “pitching a camp in protest of fun” were welcomed by the National Park Service. Without a clear distinction between camping and not-camping—the distinction that generations of Americans had tried and failed to make—he felt that “the fabric of this republic” was “going to unravel.”

Gowdy is now out of the House, but his comment echoes through a nation where camping, in its many forms, remains vital and perplexing—an emblem not just of our freedom but of its limits. Last summer, national parks saw a record number of visitors, leading to overcrowding and abundant litter. The housing crisis continues to deepen; researchers estimated that, on a single night in 2020, roughly five hundred and eighty thousand people were homeless. And Young’s central insight—that camping both reflects and challenges notions of “national belonging”—is borne out in new ways every summer. In June, 2020, in Forks, Washington, residents mistook a mixed-race family for members of Antifa. The family, unemployed because of the pandemic, had been living in a modified school bus, and had hoped to spend a few nights nearby while the bus underwent repairs. Instead, they were accosted by “patriots” in a supermarket parking lot, and then trailed into the woods by men driving trucks and A.T.V.s. At the family’s campsite, they heard bursts of gunfire, and found their escape route blocked by felled trees. According to Wired, Shannon Lowe, one of those harassed, later said, “They looked us right in the eye, and didn’t believe we were camping.”

It's not a culture war. It's button-down hate and racism

It's not a culture war. It's button-down hate and racism with a smile.

Lucian Truscott IV

Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater

You want to know how Republicans talk about “states’ rights” these days? Parental rights. The new way they talk about the “gay agenda”? Grooming. How about the new way they signify their racism? Critical Race Theory. This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with cheese or opera, but somehow Republicans have gotten away with turning prejudice and hatred into wedge issues and the culture war.

It’s like they’ve brought Lee Atwater back from the dead to run the Republican Party’s messaging. You remember Lee, don’t you? Smiling South Carolina boy who once had a political consulting firm with – you’re going to love this – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Atwater made his Republican bones working on campaigns for Strom Thurmond, the infamous segregationist who ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the States Rights Party. Thurmond was quoted during the campaign saying, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” But not into his bedroom: later in life it was revealed that he had fathered a mixed race daughter with a Black woman.

Atwater was celebrated in the Republican Party because he had figured out how to use political misdirection to get around Republican candidates being called racists when the charge was clearly an accurate one. In 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis for his book, “The Two-Party South.” Only later in a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times in 2005 was Atwater revealed as the man who said the following: “Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”

Clever guy, huh? You want to talk about race, all you have to do, like Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, is talk about “welfare queens.” Everybody knows what you’re saying without you having to come out and say it.

Today’s Lee Atwater is another smiling preppy guy by the name of Christopher Rufo who has one of those right-wing sinecures at a think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo is the thinker, if you could call it that, behind the mass-marketing of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a Republican fear campaign. To the extent that it exists at all, CRT is taught in some law schools as a legal theory holding that race plays an instrumental role in the nation’s system of criminal laws and courts. Rufo came up with the idea of claiming CRT is a liberal plot to indoctrinate grade school children with the idea that there is something inherently wrong with being white. He even did the world the favor of writing a series of Tweets spelling out his plan. “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

See? Easy. Instead of welfare queens, it’s evil second grade teachers and junior high school student counselors poisoning the minds of innocents. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, appearing in a fleece vest to give evidence of his bonafides as a man of the people, said Critical Race Theory so many times during his campaign last year his face froze. Texas legislators last year banned the teaching of the 1619 Project specifically and CRT generally from being taught in state schools, followed closely by – you guessed it – Florida. “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is Critical Race Theory,” said Governor Ron DeSantis in a press release last December. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other. We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”

And now, like magic, the bogeyman is Democrats and liberals condoning pedophilia and of course, grooming. Last month DeSantis signed the “don’t say gay” bill, banning even the mention of “gender orientation and sexual identity” in grades K-3, a classic solution in search of a problem since sex education wasn’t being taught in those grades anyway. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted last month when the bill was being argued in the state legislature.

And of course it’s spreading. Earlier this month, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed two overtly anti-transgender bills into law. One bans parents from arranging medical care for their trans children, and the other mandates that students use bathrooms that match their birth certificates. Last month, Idaho passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to provide medically necessary, age-appropriate gender affirming care for transgender children. Other Republican states have similar bills before their legislatures.

This is what Republicans are doing while Ukraine fights a war for its survival as a sovereign nation against Russia and while the Biden administration presides over record low unemployment numbers and record high economic growth. They’re creating problems where they don’t exist and appealing to racism and anti-gay, anti-trans prejudice by slapping the word “grooming” on everything in sight.

Pundits and newspaper editors and cable news shows call it culture war politics. It’s not. It’s racism and hate, plain and simple. The House, the Senate, and the White House are at stake, and if “woke” Democrats don’t wake up and figure out how to counter this bullshit, Republicans are going to push more of DeSantis and Youngkin style button-down hate and racism with a smile.

Barbra Streisand!

 

Barbra Streisand! Today 24 April she turns 80.

A truly great star, musician, director and a fabulous human being.

Happy Birthday! 

‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’

 ‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’

Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.

Fiona Hill vividly recalls the first time she stepped into the Oval Office to discuss the thorny subject of Ukraine with the president. It was February of 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Hill, then the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia for the National Intelligence Council, was summoned for a strategy session on the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. Among the matters up for discussion was the possibility of Ukraine and another former Soviet state, Georgia, beginning the process of obtaining NATO membership.

In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office.

“He’s just yanking your chain,” she remembers Bush telling her. “Go on with what you were saying.” But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, “I like it when diplomacy is tough.” Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that “NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.” Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries “will become members” without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.)

“It was the worst of all possible worlds,” Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.”

Hill would stay on in the same role in the Obama administration for close to a year. Obama’s handling of Putin did not always strike her as judicious. When Chuck Todd of NBC asked Obama at a news conference in 2013 about his working relationship with Putin, Obama replied, “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” she winced again. “We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’” Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. “He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.”

Hill was sharing these accounts at an Indian restaurant in Colorado, where she had selected some of the least spicy items on the menu, reminding me, “I’m still English,” though she is a naturalized U.S. citizen. The restaurant was a few blocks from the University of Denver campus, where Hill had just given a talk about Russia and Ukraine, one of several she would give that week.

Her descriptions of Russia’s president to her audience that morning — “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” — were both penetrating and eerily reminiscent of another domineering leader she came to know while serving as the National Security Council’s senior director of Russian and European affairs from April 2017 to July 2019. Though it stood to reason that a Putinologist of Fiona Hill’s renown would be much in demand after the invasion of Ukraine this February, it surprised me that her tenure in the Trump administration almost never came up in these discussions.

The Colorado events were part of a book tour that was scheduled long before the Russian attack. Her memoir, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. But it covers a period that can be understood as a prelude to the current conflict — Hill was present for the initial phase of Trump’s scheme to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019, by withholding military aid in exchange for political favors. It is also an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. (In response to queries for this article, Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.”)

Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin arriving for a joint news conference in Helsinki in 2018.Credit...Photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times

Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.”

Of her experience trying to steer policy during her two years in the Trump White House, Hill said: “It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self.”

With a flash of a smile, she said: “We used to have this running shtick in our office at the N.S.C. As a kid, I was a great fan of Tolkien and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So, in the Trump administration, we’d talk about the ring, and the fear of becoming Gollum” — the character deformed by his attachment to the powerful treasure — “obsessing over ‘my precious,’ the excitement and the power of being in the White House. And I did see a lot of people slipping into that.” When I asked Hill whom she saw as the Gollums in the Trump White House, she replied crisply: “The ones who wouldn’t testify in his impeachment hearing. Quite a few people, in other words.”

Fiona Hill emerged as a U.S. government expert on Russia amid a generation in which the subjects of Russia and Eastern Europe all but disappeared from America’s collective consciousness. Raised in economically depressed North East England, Hill, as a brainy teenager, was admonished by her father, who was then a hospital porter, “There is nothing for you here,” and so she moved to the United States in 1989 after a year’s study in Moscow. Hill received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and later got a job at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, she became the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. By that time, the Bush administration was keenly focused on post-Cold War and post-Sept. 11 adversaries both real and imagined, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The ambitions of Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, were steadily made manifest. On March 19, 2016, two years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a hacker working with Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, from the address no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com. The email, which claimed that a Ukrainian had compromised Podesta’s password, turned out to be a successful act of spearphishing. It allowed Russia to obtain and release, through WikiLeaks, 50,000 of Podesta’s emails, all in the furtherance of Russia’s desire that Clinton would become, if not a defeated presidential candidate, then at minimum a damaged one.

The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.

Trump and Putin at a working lunch in Helsinki. Fiona Hill is second from left.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Hill had not expected to be a fly on the White House wall for several of these moments. She even participated in the Women’s March in Washington the day following Trump’s inauguration. But then, the next day, she was called in for an interview with Keith Kellogg, at the time the N.S.C. chief of staff. Hill had previously worked with Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and several times had been on the Fox News foreign-policy online show hosted by K.T. McFarland, who had become the deputy national security adviser; the expectation was that she could become an in-house counterweight to Putin’s influence. She soon joined the administration on a two-year assignment.

Just four months into his presidency, Trump welcomed two of Putin’s top subordinates — Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — into the Oval Office. Their meeting became public only because a photographer with the Russian news agency Tass released an image of the three men laughing together.

As N.S.C. senior director for European and Russian affairs, Hill was supposed to be in the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. But that plan was scotched after her previous sit-down with Trump did not go well: The president had mistaken her for a secretary and became angry that she did not immediately agree to retype a news release for him. Just after the Russians left the Oval Office, Hill learned that Trump boasted to them about firing James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., saying that he had removed a source of “great pressure” — and that he continued to do so in his next meeting, with Henry Kissinger, though the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had come to the White House to discuss Russia.

Hill never developed the rapport with Trump that McFarland, Kellogg and H.R. McMaster (who replaced Flynn), her direct superiors, had presumably hoped for. Instead, Trump seemed more impressed with the former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state. “He’s done billion-dollar energy deals with Putin,” Hill says Trump exclaimed at a meeting.

‘The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.’

Trump’s ignorance of world affairs would have been a liability under any circumstance. But it put him at a pronounced disadvantage when it came to dealing with those strongmen for whom he felt a natural affinity, like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Once, while Trump was discussing Syria with Erdogan, Hill recalled: “Erdogan goes from talking about the history of the Ottoman Empire to when he was mayor of Istanbul. And you can see he’s not listening and has no idea what Erdogan’s talking about.” On another occasion, she told me, Trump cheerfully joked to Erdogan that the basis of most Americans’ knowledge about Turkey was “Midnight Express,” a 1978 movie that primarily takes place inside a Turkish prison. “Bad image — you need to make a different film,” Hill recalled Trump telling Turkey’s president while she thought to herself, Oh, my God, really?

When I mentioned to Hill that former White House aides had told me about Trump’s clear preference for visual materials over text, she exclaimed: “That’s spot on. There were several moments of just utter embarrassment where he would see a magazine story about one of his favorite leaders, be it Erdogan or Macron. He’d see a picture of them, and he’d want it sent to them through the embassies. And when we’d read the articles, the articles are not flattering. They’re quite critical. Obviously, we can’t send this! But then he’d want to know if they’d gotten the picture and the article, which he’d signed: ‘Emmanuel, you look wonderful. Looking so strong.’”

Hill found it dubious that a man so self-?interested and lacking in discipline could have colluded with Russia to gain electoral victory in 2016, a concern that led to investigations by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Robert Mueller, the special counsel. For that matter, she told me, she had met the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page a few times in Moscow. “I was incredulous as to how anyone could think he could be a spy. I thought he was way out of his depth.” The same held true for George Papadopoulos, another foreign-?policy adviser. “Every campaign has loads of clueless people,” she said.

Still, she came to see in Trump a kind of aspirational authoritarianism in which Putin, Erdogan, Orban and other autocrats were admired models. She could see that he regarded the U.S. government as his family-run business. In viewing how Trump’s coterie acted in his presence, Hill settled on the word “thrall,” evoking both a mystical attraction and servitude. Trump’s speeches habitually emphasized mood over thought, to powerful effect. It did not escape Hill’s attention that Trump’s chief speechwriter — indeed, the gatekeeper of whatever made its way into the president’s speeches — was Stephen Miller, who always seemed near Trump and whose influence on administration policy was “immense,” she says. Hill recalled for me a time in 2019 when Trump was visiting London and she found herself traveling through the city in a vehicle with Miller. “He was talking about all the knife fights that immigrants were causing in these areas,” she said. “And I told him: ‘These streets were a lot rougher when I was growing up and they were run by white gangs. The immigrants have actually calmed things down.’” (Miller declined to comment on the record.)

More than once during our conversations, Hill made references to the Coen brothers filmmaking team. In particular, she seemed to relate to the character played by Frances McDormand in the movie “Fargo”: a habitually unflappable police chief thrust into a narrative of bizarre misdeeds for which nothing in her long experience has prepared her. Hill was dismayed, but not surprised, she told me, when President Trump carried on about a Democratic rival, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to a foreign leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — referring to Warren as “Senator Pocahontas,” while Merkel gaped in astonishment. Or when, upon learning from Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway of her country’s reliance on hydropower, Trump took the opportunity to share his standard riff on the evils of wind turbines.

But she was alarmed, Hill told me, by Trump’s antidemocratic monologues. “He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” she recalled. “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax.’ And he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.”

“Except that he clearly meant it,” Hill insisted. She mentioned David Cornstein, a jeweler by trade and longtime friend of Trump’s whom the president appointed as his ambassador to Hungary. “Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban” — referring to the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, who has held his position since 2010 — “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.” (Cornstein could not be reached for comment.)

During Trump’s first year in office, he initially resisted meeting with President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine. Obama received Poroshenko in the Oval Office in June 2014, and the United States offered Ukraine financial and diplomatic support, while stopping short of providing requested Javelin anti-tank missiles, in part out of concerns that Russian assets within Ukraine’s intelligence community would have access to the technology, according to a 2019 NBC News interview with the former C.I.A. director John Brennan. Now, with Trump’s refusal to meet with Poroshenko, it instead fell to Vice President Mike Pence to welcome the Ukrainian leader to the White House on June 20, 2017. After their meeting, Poroshenko lingered in a West Wing conference room, waiting to see if Trump would give him a few minutes.

Finally, the president did so. The two men shook hands and exchanged pleasantries in front of the White House press corps. Once the reporters were ushered out, Trump flatly told Poroshenko that Ukraine was a corrupt country. Trump knew this, he said, because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him so.

Poroshenko said that his administration was addressing the corruption. Trump shared another observation. He said, echoing a Putin talking point, that Crimea, annexed three years earlier through Putin’s act of aggression, was rightfully Russia’s — because, after all, the people there spoke Russian.

Poroshenko protested, saying that he, too, spoke Russian. So, for that matter, did one of the witnesses to this conversation: Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who was born in Canada, later acquiring U.S. citizenship, and who recounted the episode in her recent memoir, “Lessons From the Edge.” Recalling Trump’s words to me, Yovanovitch laughed in disbelief and said, “I mean, in America, we speak English, but it doesn’t make us British!”

Trump in the Oval Office in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, who was the president of Ukraine at the time.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The encounter with Poroshenko would portend other unsettling interactions with Ukraine during the Trump era. “There were all sorts of tells going on that, while official U.S. policy toward Ukraine was quite good, that he didn’t personally love that policy,” Yovanovitch told me. “So there was always the feeling of, What’s going to happen next?”

What happened next was that Trump began to treat Ukraine as a political enemy. Bridling at the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in hopes of damaging his opponent or helping his campaign, he was receptive to the suggestion of an appealing counternarrative. “By early 2018, he began to hear and repeat the assertion that it was Ukraine and not Russia that had interfered in the election, and that they had done so to try to help Clinton,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, told me. “I knew he heard that from, among others, Rudy Giuliani. Each time that inaccurate theory was raised, I disputed it and reminded the president that it was not true, including one time when I said so in front of Mr. Giuliani.”

By 2019, a number of once-obscure Trump foreign-policy aides — among them Fiona Hill; her successor, Timothy Morrison; Yovanovitch; Yovanovitch’s deputy, George P. Kent; her political counselor, David Holmes; her successor, William B. Taylor Jr.; the N.S.C.’s director for European affairs, Alexander Vindman; the special adviser to the vice president on European and Russian affairs, Jennifer Williams; and the U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Kurt D. Volker — would be tugged into the vortex of a sub rosa scheme. It was, as Hill would memorably testify to Congress later that year, “a domestic political errand” in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump. That errand, chiefly undertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, would garishly illustrate how “Trump was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes,” Hill told me.

The first notable disruption in U.S.-Ukraine relations during Trump’s presidency came when Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorial post at Trump’s orders. Though she was widely respected in diplomatic circles, Yovanovitch’s ongoing efforts to root out corruption in Ukraine had put her in the cross hairs of two Soviet-born associates of Giuliani who were doing business in the country. Those associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, told Trump that Yovanovitch — who had served in the State Department going back to the Reagan administration — was critical of Trump. She soon became the target of negative pieces in the publication The Hill by John Solomon, a conservative writer with connections to Giuliani, including an allegation by Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute list” — which Lutsenko later recanted to a Ukrainian publication. The same month that he did so, April 2019, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.

Marie Yovanovitch during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The career ambassador and other officials urgently requested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson, issue a statement of support for her. Pompeo did not do so; according to a former senior White House official, he was eager to develop a closer bond with Trump and knew that Giuliani had the president’s ear. Subsequently, a top adviser to the secretary, Michael McKinley, resigned in protest. According to a source familiar with the matter, Pompeo responded angrily, telling McKinley that his resignation stood as proof that State Department careerists could not be counted on to loyally support President Trump’s policies. (Through a spokesman, Pompeo declined to comment on the record.)

By the spring of 2019, Trump seemed to be persuaded not only that Yovanovitch was, as Trump would later tell Zelensky, “bad news” but that Ukraine was demonstrably anti-Trump. On April 21, 2019, the president called Zelensky, who had just been elected, to congratulate him on his victory. Trump decided that he would send Pence to attend Zelensky’s inauguration. Less than three weeks later, Giuliani disclosed to The Times that he planned to soon visit Ukraine to encourage Zelensky to pursue inquiries into the origins of the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and into Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and whose father, Joe Biden, had just announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination. (Giuliani later canceled his travel plans.)

At about the same time, Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, announced to the vice president’s senior staff, “The president doesn’t want him to attend” Zelensky’s inauguration, according to someone present at the meeting. He did not — a slight to a European head of state.

On May 23, 2019, Charles Kupperman, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and others discussed Ukraine with Trump in the Oval Office. Speaking to the press about the matter for the first time, Kupperman told me that the very subject of Ukraine threw the president into a rage: “He just let loose — ‘They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me.’”

Because Kupperman had seen how disdainfully Trump treated allies like Merkel, Macron, Theresa May of Britain and Moon Jae-in of South Korea, he knew how unlikely it was that the president could come to see the geopolitical value of Ukraine. “He felt like our allies were screwing us, and he had no sense as to why these alliances benefited us or why you need a global footprint for military and strategic capabilities,” Kupperman told me. “If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was. He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history: how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.”

In July 2019, Trump ordered that a hold be placed on nearly $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine that had already been appropriated by Congress. The president stood essentially alone in his opposition to such assistance, Kupperman told me: “Everyone in the interagency process was uniformly united to release the aid. We needed to do this, there was no controversy to it, but it got held up anyway.” News of the freeze became public that September, and the White House variously claimed that the funds had been withheld because of Ukraine’s corruption and because other NATO countries should be contributing more to Ukraine. Alyssa Farah Griffin, then the Pentagon press secretary, recalled to me that she asked Laura Cooper, the Department of Defense deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, whether the hold was part of the standard review process.

“Absolutely not,” Cooper replied to her. “Nothing about this is normal.”

A few days later, the Trump White House released a reconstructed transcript of the president’s July 25 phone conversation with Zelensky. In it, Trump responded to the Ukrainian leader’s interest in purchasing Javelin missiles by saying: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike” — a reference to the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate its 2016 email security breach, which became a facet of Giuliani’s hallucinatory claim that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that stole the emails. In the same conversation, Trump requested that Zelensky help Giuliani investigate “Biden’s son,” referring to Hunter Biden, and ominously said of his recently fired ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, that “she’s going to go through some things.”

“My first reaction to it,” Farah Griffin told me in speaking about the phone call for the first time publicly, “was that it was wildly inappropriate to be bringing up domestic political concerns, and it seemed to border on the conspiratorial. I’d been around for a lot of head-of-state meetings and calls, and they’re pretty pro forma. You know the things that you’re not supposed to say. It seemed like such a bizarre breach of diplomacy.” She went on: “But then, once it became clear that the Office of Management and Budget had actually blocked the money prior to the conversation, I thought: Wow. This is bad.”

Fiona Hill and most of the others who testified in 2019 during Trump’s first impeachment hearings were unknown to ordinary Americans — and, for that matter, to Trump himself, who protested on Twitter that his accusers were essentially nobodies. It was their fidelity to their specialized labors that made them such effective witnesses. “One benefit to our investigation,” said Daniel Goldman, who served as the lead majority counsel to the House impeachment inquiry, “was that these were for the most part career public servants who took extensive contemporaneous notes every day. As a result, we received very detailed testimony that helped us figure out what happened.”

Hill being sworn in as a witness during impeachment-inquiry hearings in November 2019.Credit...Al Drago/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

In reality, however, what happened in the Ukraine episode was not evident to much of the public. Trump prevailed in his impeachment trial, seeming to emerge from the ordeal without a political scratch. This, his former national security adviser John Bolton told me, distinguished the inquiry from the investigation into the conduct of President Richard Nixon 45 years earlier, which resulted in Nixon’s fellow Republicans deserting him. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his first impeachment trial “clearly did embolden him,” Bolton said. “This is Trump saying, ‘I got away with it.’ And thinking, If I got away with it once, I can get away with it again. And he did get away with it again.” (Bolton did not testify before the House committee; at the time, his lawyer said he was “not willing to appear voluntarily.”)

Hill, for her part, emerged from the events of 2019 rather dazed by her sudden fame — but just as much so, she told me, by the implications of what she and other White House colleagues had experienced that culminated in Trump’s impeachment. “In real time, I was putting things together,” she said. “The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.”

Hill was at her desk at home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, writing her memoir, when a journalist friend she first met in Russia called. The friend told her to turn on the television. Once she did so, a burst of horrific clarity overtook her. “I saw the thread,” she told me. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”

Alexander Vindman, who was removed from his job as N.S.C. director for European affairs months after testifying against Trump (the president, his son Don Jr. and other supporters accused Vindman, a Soviet émigré and Army officer, of disloyalty, perjury and espionage), told me he experienced a similar epiphany in the wake of Jan. 6. Vindman was exercising at a gym in Virginia that afternoon when his wife, Rachel, called him to say that a mob had attacked the U.S. Capitol. After recovering from his stupefaction, “my first impulse was to counterprotest,” Vindman recalled. “I was thinking, What can I do to defend the Capitol? Then I realized that would be a recipe for disaster. It might give the president cause to invoke martial law.”

In Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results, Vindman told me, the president revealed himself as “incompetent, his own worst enemy, faced with too many checks in a 240-plus-year-old democracy to be able to operate with a free hand.” At the same time, he went on: “I came to see these seemingly individual events — the Ukraine scandal, the attempt to steal the 2020 election — as part of a broader tapestry. And the domestic effects of all this are bad enough. But there’s also a geopolitical impact. We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testifying before the House Intelligence Committee during the impeachment inquiry in November 2019.Credit...David Butow/Redux

Instead, Vindman said, the opposite occurred: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here. He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys. I’m not pulling any punches here. I’m not using diplomatic niceties. These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for.”

Bolton, a renowned foreign-policy hawk who also served in the administrations of Reagan and George W. Bush, also told me that Trump’s behavior had dealt damage to both Ukraine and America. The refusal to lend aid to Ukraine, the subsequent disclosure of the heavy-handed conversation with Zelensky and then the impeachment hearing all served to undermine Ukraine’s new president, Bolton told me. “It made it impossible for Zelensky to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority. So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.”

Trump, Bolton went on to say, “is a complete aberration in the American system. We’ve had good and bad presidents, competent and incompetent presidents. But none of them was as centered on their own interest, as opposed to the national interest, except Trump. And his concept of what the national interest was really changed from day to day and had a lot more to do with what his political fortunes were.” This was certainly the case with Trump’s view of Ukraine, which, Bolton said, describing fantasies that preoccupied the president, “he saw entirely through the prism of Hillary Clinton’s server and Hunter Biden’s income — what role Ukraine had in Hillary’s efforts to steal the 2016 election and what role Ukraine had in Biden’s efforts to steal the 2020 election.”

Bolton acknowledged to me that he found Trump’s conduct both in the Ukraine scandal and on Jan. 6 to be arguably worthy of impeachment. Still, he offered a rather tangled assessment of the two processes — finding fault with Democrats in the first inquiry for “trying to ram it through quickly” and, in the second impeachment, for not pressing quickly enough and “trying him before January the 20th.”

But Bolton seems to regard the former president’s abuses of power as validation of America’s institutional strengths rather than a warning sign. “I think he did damage to the United States before and because of January the 6th,” Bolton told me. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. But I think all that damage was reparable. I think that constitutions are written with human beings involved, and occasionally you get bad actors. This was a particularly bad actor. So with all the stress and strain on the Constitution, it held up pretty well.”

When I asked whether he believed Trump could be viewed as an authoritarian, Bolton replied, “He’s not smart enough to be an authoritarian.” But had Donald Trump won in 2020, Bolton told me, in his second term he might well have inflicted “damage that might not be reparable.” I asked whether his same concerns would apply if Trump were to gain another term in 2024, and Bolton answered with one word: “Yes.”

At the moment, Trump’s chances of victory are favorable. He remains the putative lead candidate for the G.O.P.’s nomination and would most likely face an 81-year-old incumbent whose approval ratings are underwater. Even in defeat, there is little reason to believe that Trump will concede at all, much less do so gracefully. This January, President Biden said: “I know the majority of the world leaders — the good and the bad ones, adversaries and allies alike. They’re watching American democracy and seeing whether we can meet this moment.” Biden went on to say that at the G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, the previous summer, his assurances that America was back were met by his foreign counterparts with the response, “For how long?”

One former foreign-policy official who played a role in the Trump-Ukraine tensions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the former president, was unsettled but also unsurprised by Biden’s account. “In the back of their minds,” this former official said of America’s allies, “if Trump is elected again in 2024, where will we be? I think it would be seen among struggling democracies as a disaster. They would see Trump as someone who went through two impeachment inquiries, orchestrated a conspiracy to undo a failed election and then, somehow, is re-elected. They would see it as Trump truly unbound. But to them, it would also say something about us and our values.”

Hill agreed with that assessment when I described it to her. “We’ve been the gold standard of democratic elections,” she told me. “All of that will be rolled back if Trump returns to power after claiming that the only way he could ever lose is if someone steals it from him. It’ll be more than diplomatic shock. I think it would mean the total loss of America’s leadership position in the world arena.”

A couple of months ago, Hill told me, she attended a book event in Louisville, Ky. Onstage with her was another recent author, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who was the House Democrats’ lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Raskin, who happens to be Hill’s congressman, had also been among the managers in the first trial.

Their event took place on Jan. 24, exactly one month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though Putin’s troops had been massed along the border for several months, speculation of war was not a public preoccupation. For the moment, Hill’s expertise was in lesser demand than that of Raskin, who is now a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. For much of their hourlong colloquy, it was Hill who asked searching questions of Raskin — who, she told me, “was deeply disturbed by how close we came to basically not having a transfer of power.”

At one point, Hill acknowledged to Raskin and the live audience that she had been thinking lately of the “Hamilton” song “You’ll Be Back,” crooned maliciously by King George to his American subjects. “I have been worried over whether we might be back to that kind of period,” she said. Hill went on to describe the United States as being in a state of de-evolution, with the checks on executive power flagging and the concept of governmental experience regarded with scorn rather than admiration.

What she did not say then was something that Hill has told me more than once since that time. Throughout all our changes, presidents and senior staff in government, she said: “Putin has been there for 22 years. He’s the same guy, with the same people around him. And he’s watching everything.”

A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories

A break from the war...

‘Death Cleaning’: A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories

The New York Times

These letters are among the more than 500 responses from readers to our request for personal stories about dealing with their own lifetime accumulation of possessions or that of a loved one.

April 9, 2022, 6:00 a.m. ET

I never had a good relationship with my mother. As one of her primary caretakers, I dreaded the end of her life. It meant reckoning with the past as I cleaned out her belongings from our family home of 62 years.

The last few months of her life I went through her private belongings. Among her papers, I found nine typed pages by my teachers reviewing my three years in nursery and kindergarten — words that my mother clearly held close to her heart. I found many pieces of artwork I had made for her that I thought were unappreciated and destroyed.

By the time she died of dementia in her home, I had received the grace to grieve her loss in a way I thought unimaginable. Disposing of her physical belongings gave me the gift of realizing a love she had for me I never knew existed.

Graham G. Hawks

Fayetteville, Ark.

To the Editor:

By the time I’d found my mom’s fifth copy of Mickey Rooney’s autobiography, “Life Is Too Short,” I knew I had my work cut out for me. My parents were hoarders. Fifty years of clutter awaited me. Where to start?

My mom had just died from pancreatic cancer. My dad was 85, barely able to walk or see. I had a lifetime of clutter to deal with while I cared for my ailing father. Fortunately, my salvation was the man hired to refinish my mom’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove. He was looking for investment property.

I agreed to sell my dad’s house on one condition — that the buyer deal with the clutter. He agreed. Turns out I left behind clutter to fill 12 giant dumpsters.

I needed to plan my mom’s funeral, pack up my dad and his three dogs, and bring them home to surprise my wife and three kids. Heartless as it may sound, I turned my back on my childhood home and never looked back.

I took the only things that truly mattered. My memories, my dad, his dogs and a copy of Mickey Rooney’s autobiography.

Ralph Nichols

San Jose, Calif.

To the Editor:

After my mother passed, I had to work quickly and meticulously through the pain to sort through her belongings and vacate her apartment by the end of the month. She had saved almost everything, which left my task not only daunting but also emotionally fraught.

My childhood friend helped me and stumbled across my mother’s college diary while sifting through the rubble. A dilemma presented itself. Do I respect my mother’s privacy (which to her had been paramount) by not reading the diary, or do I tiptoe through it to gain the otherworldly gift of getting to know her on a deeper level after she was gone?

I battled uncomfortably for weeks to reach my conclusion. Then I started reading it — bit by bit, line by line, my heart and memory swelling with every curve and slant of her pen.

This year marks a decade since mom’s passing. I not only feel closer to her through her words, but my understanding of her has grown beyond them. Her precious time capsule continues to reveal her, as many treasured entries remain unread.

Today is April 10, 1958 …

Suzanne Frey-Obolsky

Athens, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I’m 88, living on borrowed time, and I ain’t planning to dispose of even 15-year-old copies of The New Yorker. Why should I spend any of my few remaining days, months or years culling the detritus of my long life? Surely I have better, more meaningful ways to spend my end of days.

Isn’t it enough that my children will receive whatever is left? Gosh, there’s some pretty good stuff in that mess. And isn’t it possible that inching their way through it will prove to be an interesting and rewarding treasure hunt?

And, more seriously, won’t this exercise tell them things about me that could not be learned any other way, adding mortar to their memory, and perhaps even their regard for me?

Dana Wickware

Clinton, Conn.

To the Editor:

My mother had a frog problem. Frogs, frogs, frogs. Ceramic frogs, pewter frogs, rhinestone costume jewelry frogs. Frog bookends and Murano glass frogs. Frog vases, Kermit coffee mugs, a rainbow fleet of plastic poison dart frogs clinging to houseplants. My magnificent mother was an artist and a businesswoman, and what remained of her one wild and precious life was her collection of amphibian kitsch.

Clearing out her house in a pandemic, I flung a lifetime of dusty or mildewed treasures into a giant orange dumpster. Estate sale people haggled away my mom’s well-curated life to masked strangers. I honestly didn’t have room for any of it, and besides, I had my own life to endure without her.

In my grief-stricken haze, I did manage to pack up one 18-gallon Rubbermaid bin to the brim. With all the frogs. A golden meditating frog, a sliver Prince Charming frog begging to be kissed, a fat brass frog with a round shiny belly. They are all over my house, and I adore every last ribbiting one of them.

Arlaina Tibensky

South Orange, N.J.

To the Editor:

To begin, there’s the distasteful word itself: clutter. When I had to close down my mother’s apartment after she needed to go to a nursing home, it felt as if I were throwing away a life. Was that clutter?

Now that we’ve decided to move from a house to smaller living quarters, there’s so much sorting to do: what to keep, to discard, or to give away. Books are like friends — what’s the fate for each one? The notebooks and papers representing our professional lives of learning, teaching and various workplaces now only have value as memory triggers — out they must go. And of course there are many other items with emotional attachment to be dealt with. Is all that just so much clutter?

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The word captures none of the wistful sadness of the triage required to downsize one’s accumulated past life, even while looking forward to the next phase.

Peter Schmidt

Newton, Mass.

To the Editor:

We couldn’t wait to get rid of our stuff as the day approached for us to start our retired life as full-time world traveling nomads. Our adult children, on the other hand, hesitated when we invited them to the house to take whatever they wanted.

We told them to act as if we were dead. Awkward giggles and denials were soon replaced with action. They started opening drawers and closets, asking questions, and taking things. Tears, hugs and giggles flowed.

We all enjoyed sharing the stories of the items together. It was much better for them to understand the connections directly from us rather than guessing later after our deaths. The whole process was rewarding and freeing.

But sadly, no one wanted the heirloom china, glassware or silver. Those treasures and other unwanted items went into the estate sale. At the end of our great disposal of 2,800 square feet of lifelong keepsakes, we had two carry-on suitcases for departure and a small trash bag for the garbage man.

Chris Englert

Livingston, Texas

To the Editor:

Clothes lay strewn about the room — khaki shorts dangling inside out; a white T-shirt tossed over the arm of a chair; sneakers akimbo, pungent, center floor. He’d been wearing those clothes the day before when we’d said goodbye. He’d agreed to meet us in Maine two days hence. But now, just a glass of water half empty on the table, his fingerprints still visible, alongside a note and the pen he’d used to write it.

The surprises you find in your 20-year-old’s room: ticket stubs from an Orioles game 12 years prior; two mysterious chestnuts; the unseen and now crumpled report card from his most recent semester at college; a machete under the bed. More clothes in heaps: black corduroys atop a blue striped polo; bluejeans tangled in heavy gray socks.

Which clothes had he finally chosen to meet the train that took his life? I’ll never know. But I decided to wash nothing, folding instead each item ever so meticulously, starting with the sheets he’d just slept in, the scent of youthful slumber grievously fresh.

Anne Sobel

Princeton, N.J.

To the Editor:

When my mom died, her kitchen contained four white dinner plates, four white coffee mugs and four drinking glasses with her initials and those of my dad entwined. That glassware was a special purchase on her part, as she rarely indulged in anything just for herself. The collectibles in the house that were gifts to her over the years had long been donated or given away.

My house contains several different dish patterns, enough tableware for a complete service for a party of 64 — not that my house would hold that many. I rotate the china patterns and matching glassware to match the seasons of the year. As I do that, I catch my reflection in mom’s mirror hanging over the dining room buffet, and notice how much I look like her now. That face in the mirror has the sheepish look of someone who has indulged far too much.

Mary Edwards

Pittsburgh

To the Editor:

Someday, we’ll sort, together, we said. Boxes of love and life — pictures, letters, music. Someday never comes. My husband’s A.L.S. progresses. He dies, in my arms. Simon says, freeze. I could move nothing of his.

Then a call. “My friend fell and is paralyzed. This is awkward, but since your husband recently passed …” Purpose. I move and gather — the shower chair, ramps, and on and on. I bring them to this family. We meet and share, and of all things, eat soup by the fire, play cards, smile.

Back home, my house is different without the A.L.S. trappings. I put his guitar back by the piano. I put his hairbrush in my purse. I open boxes — our life pours over me, and I sort. I remember us, who I am, the person left standing, the winds of love at my back. My closets clean, my heart full of love and gratitude. Better now.

Vera Cole

Green Lane, Pa.

To the Editor:

When my estranged mother lost her independence to Alzheimer’s dementia last summer, her care fell to me. She went into assisted living; her modest belongings went to Goodwill. Ten boxes of her personal effects now occupy my living room.

I invite my mother to pare down the contents of her 10 boxes. She gamely pores over her forgotten journals. She giggles at her former self and declares lucidly that the journals have served their purpose. We disassemble the spiral notebooks for the recycling bin.

Her photos document the life of a professional fiddle player, spanning decades and genres. I see the landscapes of her Northern California road trips and music gatherings. My mom poses naked with hippies around a swimming hole, laughing then as she is laughing now at these foggy, perplexing memories.

I am getting to know my mother just as her life is waning. Reviewing her life’s work and play, enjoying her unfiltered, childlike commentary, I realize: This version of my mother I can love. We may never make it through the 10 boxes, but that’s OK. What matters is the process.

Karla Gostnell

Portland, Ore.

To the Editor:

By the time my mother passed at age 100, there was only one item left in her apartment that she cherished — a huge framed needlepoint tapestry of Moses in the bulrushes hovering over her bed.

As a work of art it was hideous and its sentimental value was vague — something about being a family heirloom that my mother had buried in Poland and then retrieved after the war. But to my mother it was priceless. “Don’t sell the Moses,” she pleaded. “And don’t let Merle take it.”

Merle was her aide, a devout Christian who admired the biblical scene of baby Moses and would tease: “If you’re not good, I’m going to take Moses.” Unlikely, since Moses was very heavy and the size of an upright piano, but my mother took her seriously.

Now Moses resides in the back of my closet, swathed in a mover’s blanket and plastic wrapping, safe from Merle and the world, as I promised.

Gail Birnbaum Kraushar

New York

To the Editor:

As a pastor for over 40 years, I have preached hundreds of sermons. Before the advent of computer word processing, these sermons were handwritten and edited and then typed. Six cardboard file boxes have accompanied me through four moves.

One morning’s musing found me wondering what would happen to these sermon files after I died. I pictured my grieving son clearing out my condo, opening the boxes and solemnly saying to his wife, “These are my dead mother’s sermons.” What would he do with them? What could he do with them?

That very day I deposited all six boxes in my building’s dumpster. I have felt lighter and freer since — and my son will never know what he missed.

Louise Westfall

Denver

To the Editor:

Emptying our house after 38 years was daunting, but clearing the attic turned out to be one of the most moving experiences of my life (pun accidental). I no longer felt that I was looking at my past; I was walking right back in. Teenage boyfriends’ letters recalled the angst of adolescent love. Camp photographs evoked Texas Hill Country air. Forty-year-old letters from my sister and brother expressed the same concerns we share today.

Then I found the scrapbook devoted entirely to my year as a high school cheerleader. I’d spent the last 50 years ridiculing my teenage self for so desiring that honor, but turning the pages of that lovingly assembled keepsake, my 68-year-old committed feminist self finally understood.

hundreds of possessions, but never once had I contemplated parting with my gigantic megaphone with a cartoon of our high-school mascot (a mule!) painted above my name and my list of cheers taped inside. It now lives in our basement storage — my overdue recognition of that 17-year-old. C’est moi. I might as well embrace her. My kids can deal with the megaphone.

Sydney Stern

New York

To the Editor:

After moving my wife’s parents to a nursing home we cleaned out their home of 50 years. We traveled 2,000 miles, using vacation time, and spent seven 12-to-14-hour days throwing their stuff out, giving it to charities and in some cases selling items. There were papers to sort through, clothes to get rid of, cherished family mementos and keepsakes to store or dispose of, a house to sell, and so much more. We would be emotionally drained, go to sleep, and have to do it all again the next day.

For the first few days the emotions would get to my wife, and she would start crying and need time to get past them. After being very meticulous in the early days, the last couple of days we were numb and just getting rid of “stuff.” In the end a couple’s entire life’s accumulation was just a burden for someone else.

It was the hardest task either of us had ever done, taking a physical, emotional and to some extent even spiritual toll that took many months to recover from.

In the end, the best thing we can do is to plan ahead and provide guidance for those who decide the fate of our belongings, or better yet, determine what’s truly important and get rid of everything else.

Joel Robe

Eugene, Ore.

To the Editor:

After years of cajoling from her children to move to a living space with fewer steps and more companions, my 91-year-old mother-in-law finally relocated from her house into assisted living. As she recovered from a fall, my fiercely independent mother-in-law apologized to her children for deputizing them with the task of cleaning out the family home.

Decades of accumulated memories, books, houseplants, furniture and kitchenware confronted us, as children, in-laws and grandchildren sifted through her worldly goods. Hours extended into days of cleaning, and tossing once-precious items became too easy.

“Could you find the blue and red wool scarf my grandmother knit for me?” she requested. The scarf was the last gift her grandmother had given her before she escaped from Nazi Europe at the age of 9. Months later, her grandparents perished in Auschwitz.

I remembered holding that old, stiff, handmade scarf in my hands, but couldn’t recall where I had triaged it. After searching unsuccessfully through trash bags, my husband and his brother reluctantly moved on. Then a small victory revealed itself at the bottom of her bureau — a child’s hand-knit scarf in the blue and red of the American flag.

Sharon G. Forman

Scarsdale, N.Y.

To the Editor:

The last shiva guests had barely left when we began filling garbage bags. My father, always a tyrant, had become a pack rat. Having broken off contact with my parents decades earlier, I never saw the house where they spent the last 20 years until the morning of his funeral.

While our mother sat in the kitchen, wondering what widowhood might mean, my siblings and I hauled out broken luggage, attachments for long-gone vacuum cleaners, countless pieces of twine. We filled six dumpsters in three days, yet barely put a dent in what he’d accumulated. It was cathartic to toss so much so fast.

Whenever one of us found something we might want to keep — a backgammon set, unused postcards aged to a perfect kitsch — another sibling immediately lodged a competing claim for it. How quickly each of us became as selfish as he was. How hard his legacy is to resist.

In the end, all I took were photographs of myself as a toddler and of long-dead relatives I’d never met, and two manila envelopes of my childhood artwork, which I’d discovered at the back of a basement closet. There was nothing else worth fighting over, nothing worth holding onto.

Lois Leveen

Portland, Ore.