Donald Trump left the White House in January 2021 as a defeated, disgraced figure, soon after the House of Representatives impeached him for a second time.
When that second impeachment trial concluded, members of the U.S. Senate had the chance to convict Trump and, in so doing, bar him from holding federal office ever again—something the House had recommended as part of the articles of impeachment. The final vote in the Senate was 57–43 in favor of convicting Trump, 10 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority.
The Senate's failure on February 13, 2021, was not the singular thing that brought us to this moment—where it appears (but is not yet certain) that Trump will win the 2024 presidential election and will soon be the president-elect. But it was the first in the cascade of decisions that led here, and without it none of the others would have been possible: The matter would have been settled, for good, in the appropriate constitutional venue for settling such affairs. Instead, then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) off-loaded that responsibility to the criminal justice system.
In the 1,362 days since then, Trump has staged a political comeback that seemed both impossible and, at least once it got rolling, inevitable. He's been arrested, convicted, literally bloodied by an assassin's bullet.
Now, he appears to be on the precipice of victory once more. By early Wednesday, the major media networks called Georgia and North Carolina for Trump, giving him a number of plausible pathways to victory in the Electoral College. He seems to be on strong footing in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona, which would provide a clear winning margin even if Vice President Kamala Harris manages to win the remaining swing states. The counting will continue into the morning, and perhaps beyond, and it's not out of the question that Harris could find a narrow path to victory.
But that path is now exceptionally narrow. As of 1 a.m., The New York Times gave Trump a 95 percent chance of winning. Other outlets tracking the election have come to similar conclusions. The writing is on the wall, even if the paint is not yet fully dry.
For Trump's allies and supporters, his victory would undoubtedly be proof of his singular political talents: a heroic journey unlike any that an American politician has ever taken.
But Trump is no hero and four more years of him in the White House would only encourage and entrench some terrible ideas. He aims to raise new and higher barriers to global trade that would burden American families and businesses at home while diminishing American soft power abroad. His promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants, if turned into actual policy, would be an attack on fundamental rights and a serious blow to the country's economy. His tax plans carry an implied promise of more borrowing. He's fantasized about using government power to punish unfriendly news organizations, and he has expressed an authoritarian belief in his own legal immunity from accountability.
In sum: Any hope of steering the Republican Party back toward a principled belief in limited government, free markets, and antiauthoritarianism may very well die (for at least a generation) with Trump's ultimate vindication.
Trump's victory, as Reason's Brian Doherty wrote yesterday, comes with "a short-term promise to assault and kidnap and ship out millions of residents who have harmed no one's life or property, and in doing so destroy huge chunks of America's productive economy, disrupting the lives of the other millions of legal citizens who hire them, work for them, depend on their services, or rent and sell to them. Only one has major supporters who cheer a masochistic vision of him as a 'daddy' righteously punishing a misbehaving nation."
Clearly, this is not a hero's journey but rather a condemnation of the state of American politics. The blame flows in many directions. Republicans for rallying around an obviously unfit, self-interested, disgraced candidate. Democrats for failing to find a better candidate—a candidate who may have emerged from a competitive primary process, one that Harris almost certainly wouldn't have won—to run against Trump. If either major party had simply nominated a normal candidate, this election probably wouldn't have been close.
But I keep being drawn back to those 43 Republican senators who declined to close off this possible future when given the chance. The U.S. Constitution gave them unambiguous power to act, as part of a process that is inherently political, to rid the country of Trump's chaos and authoritarianism. If things go bad, if American liberty is seriously eroded during the next Trump administration, they deserve to be remembered for the moment when they did not have the courage to do the necessary thing.
Kamala Harris is the loser of the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump has 277 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press, with several states still left to be decided, but also leaning in Trump's direction. Even in reliably Democratic strongholds, Harris underperformed.
For instance, Harris won New York, but by a mere 11-point margin as of press time; in 2020, Biden's margin there was 23 points. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in Hidalgo County, Texas—a heavily Latino county that both Biden and Hillary Clinton handily won. NBC News exit polls suggested Harris experienced significant losses with Latino voters, who went 65 percent for Biden then but were breaking only 53 percent for Harris.
Surely some voters were motivated by these things, as some people always are. But one needn't imagine a mass hate wave to explain Trump's victory.
In the weeks leading up to the election, candidate Harris struggled to define herself as polls repeatedly showed little daylight between her and Trump. Often, it seemed that Trump's flaws were Harris' main selling point. She was not Trump. But, who was she? Even Harris herself seemed scared to say.
Throughout her brief campaign, Harris strenuously avoided laying out detailed plans or positions, outside of protecting abortion access. She had an especially hard time articulating how her administration would be different from the not-terribly-popular Joe Biden presidency or how she would turn things like inflation around.
This struggle to differentiate herself from Biden makes sense in light of her career history. She's probably best understood as an ambitious vessel for whatever drives Democratic voters in a given era. She represents the Democratic Party establishment through and through.
If Harris has any personal political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they've been buried so deep by this point as to basically be undetectable—entirely subsumed by skilled pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That's why Harris has a reputation as a flip-flopper. That's why she spent much of her short 2024 campaign walking back positions she took during the quite-different political days of 2019 and 2020. And it's why she tried hard not to stake out strong positions on most issues this time around.
Yes, Harris had reproductive rights on her side. But while that's been a huge issue this election, it's only one issue—and not even one where Trump, who says he doesn't want a nationwide abortion ban, totally disagrees.
A lot of these proposals are promoted as ways to lower prices, increase opportunity, and help economically struggling Americans. But in practice, these policies would shift costs around or even drive them up, while throttling innovation and making everything from housing to condoms less affordable. They also lack a sort of cohesive appeal—a meta-narrative or vision that the campaign could easily sell.
In many ways, a Harris presidency promised to be a continuation of the past four years. Harris would have put a glossier and more modern spin on the surface, but underneath it was the same selectively progressive and economically nonsensical schtick. Not a huge departure—but not an old white man (take your pick which) of questionable cognitive functioning.
That seems mostly what the Harris campaign was selling. Voters apparently wanted more.
Donald Trump has once again won the presidency—and has done so convincingly.
In the coming days and weeks, commentators will spill considerable ink trying to make sense of this result. Mainstream media figures must grapple with the fact that a seemingly disgraced, twice-impeached, convicted felon—one frequently derided as a fascist and a racist—was reelected president. Moreover, he made major inroads with minority communities, vastly improved his totals in various states, and is currently projected to win the popular vote. Make no mistake: This is a significant win for someone deemed not merely unelectable but wholly evil by every elite media institution in existence.
Pundits trying to understand how Trump could have possibly achieved this unthinkable comeback will focus on his message, his issues, and his campaign strategies. They will investigate the aspects of Trump that make him so appealing to throngs of Americans. But they might overlook the single most important contributing factor in Trump's victory: not an affirmative vote for the candidate, but rather a negative endorsement of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Simply put, Harris was a disastrous candidate. Admittedly, she had a tough job, given that she replaced the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee—President Joe Biden—in the eleventh hour. But keep in mind that Biden was historically unpopular. He bottomed out at a 38 percent approval rating, which made him the least popular president in 70 years. Some of that disapproval was due to his advanced age and obvious cognitive decline, and in that respect, Harris was an automatic improvement.
But the fundamental mistake of the Harris campaign—the one that assured Trump's reelection no matter how improbable it seemed to elite tastemakers—was assuming that a simple candidate swap would be sufficient. This was egregiously wrong. Biden was not merely unpopular because he was too old to serve as president. He was unpopular because the American voters dislike his policies. On the issues that mattered most to voters—the economy, inflation, and immigration—majorities of voters solidly preferred Trump over Biden, well before the June debate performance that doomed the incumbent president's candidacy. Voters remembered the Trump economy fondly and blamed Biden's policies for ever-worsening inflation.
Once Harris was installed as the candidate, she had the opportunity to engage in a reset. While she always faced the inherent difficulty of distancing herself from an administration in which she served, she had every opportunity to throw Biden under the bus and part ways with his policies. She could have criticized his economic setbacks, his foreign policy—which was especially unpopular in the must-win state of Michigan—and his border program.
Yet one month ago, when she appeared on The View, the hosts asked Harris if there was anything she would have done differently from Biden. Her answer? "There's not a thing that comes to mind."
That was an incredible mistake. The American people could not possibly have signaled any more strongly that they wanted a change—a fundamental break—with the inflationary policies of the Biden administration. Harris did not run from these policies: She co-signed them.
Indeed, there are several ways in which Harris may have been a worse candidate overall than Biden. It's true that Biden's rapidly declining mental state made him a likely loser in the 2024 election. But Biden, at least, had a track record of winning previous elections. Harris' only foray into national presidential campaigns ended disastrously, with her early exit from the 2019–2020 race. That was after she adopted a number of toxically unpopular progressive stances, many of which she was forced to shed over the course of the last four months. This rendered her a decidedly weak candidate; say what you will about Biden, but he had the good sense not to alienate Pennsylvania voters by endorsing a fracking ban.
Harris never ran from Biden's record or pretended that she represented some actual sea change in policy. Her pitch was: Biden's second term, overseen by a younger and more capable person.
This pitch did not merely come up short—it vastly underperformed expectations. That's because voters wanted to part ways with both Biden and his inflationary policies.
Whether Trump can deliver on his promises and restore the country's future remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain: The decision to suddenly and dramatically install Harris as the Democratic nominee—without any change whatsoever to the Democratic Party's underlying policy agenda—will be seen as a foolish mistake. Americans don't want Biden, but they don't want Bidenism either. Harris was more of the exact same.
At a Harley-Davidson dealership in Appalachia, one expects to encounter the occasional roar of some serious horsepower.
Less expected is the sight that has accompanied that sound in Swannanoa, North Carolina, for the past three weeks: helicopters, many of them privately owned and operated, launching and landing from a makeshift helipad in the backyard of the local hog shop. According to the men who organized this private relief effort in the wake of devastating floods unleashed by the remnants of Hurricane Helene, more than a million pounds of goods—food, heavy equipment to clear roads, medical gear, blankets, heaters, tents, you name it—have been flown from here to dots all over the map of western North Carolina.
"We're not the government, and we're here to help," says one of the two men standing by the makeshift gate—a pair of orange traffic drums—that controls access to and from the Harley-Davidson dealership's parking lot and the piles of donated items neatly organized within it. "We can do it quicker, we can do it efficiently, and we genuinely just want to help our neighbors." He identifies himself only by his first name and later asks that I don't use even that. It's an understandable request, as what he's doing is probably not, strictly speaking, totally legal.
There are a lot of those blurry lines in western North Carolina right now, and thankfully the police are either too busy or too grateful for the help to care much about it. An ethos of do-it-yourself-ism, plenty of cooperation, and a healthy amount of "ask forgiveness rather than permission" is on display everywhere in Asheville and its surroundings.
Every bit of it is needed. The flooding caused by Helene is catastrophic, as I witnessed firsthand during a two-day trip to the area last week. Pictures and videos on social media and in the news do not fully capture the scope of this disaster—and the digging out, picking up, and rebuilding is a process far too large and too important to be left to the government.
The Harley-Davidson dealership in Swannanoa, North Carolina, has become an official relief center in the weeks since Hurricane Helene hit. (Photo by Eric Boehm)Piles of bottled water, clothes, gasoline, propane, and more donated goods in Swannanoa, where an ad hoc helicopter landing pad has been set up. (Photo by Eric Boehm)
"It's been miraculous."
The man largely responsible for organizing the Harley-Davidson airlift is a burly, bearded former Green Beret who goes by Adam Smith—yes, really.
Smith was on a work trip to Texas on September 27, when the remnants of Helene stormed into the southern Appalachians and dumped over 20 inches of rain onto the mountains. After losing contact with his ex-wife and 3-year-old daughter, Smith drove through the night to get back to the Asheville area. What greeted him was a nightmare: Roads to the mountain hamlet where the two lived were completely impassable, thanks to downed trees and power lines, mudslides, and collapsed bridges. After two days of trying to get to them, and still no contact, Smith feared the worst.
"They're about eight miles that way," he gestures toward the mountain ridge that runs south of Swannanoa, an area where some of the worst flooding in the area occurred. "I just assumed they were dead at that point."
Former Green Berets don't give up easily. Through a series of connections, Smith got in touch with someone who owned a small recreational helicopter. On the morning of September 29, he hitched a ride on his last hope.
He found them, alive and well. Tears well up in his eyes when I ask him about that moment. "We landed the helicopter and I was getting out of the door and I saw them walk from the tree line," he says. "And they were perfect."
They weren't the only ones who needed help. Smith's day job these days is running Savage Freedoms Defense, a training and consulting firm, where he draws on his military experience to help prepare people to take care of themselves and their loved ones under difficult circumstances. Through that business and via connections with other retired special operations veterans in the area, Smith launched what's been called a redneck air force to get supplies to flooded mountain towns. Smith owns motorcycles and knows people who work at the Harley-Davidson dealership. He also knew it would be a perfect spot for the group's ad hoc operations: a big parking lot with a single entrance, and a large field out back where the helicopters have been landing.
By the end of the first week, they had three civilian helicopters running missions, and it has only grown from there. In addition to food and supplies, the group has carried Starlink devices into places where internet and cell connections were down.
Bringing together veterans and others with experience in emergency response meant that the group had people who knew "the different systems and procedures and process, and understand the red tape and also understanding the people on the ground," says Austin Holmes, who is handling communications for Savage Freedoms.
The bootstrapped operation has gained notoriety in the region—and a visit from former President Donald Trump on Monday of this week—as well as the respect of the National Guard, which has started piggybacking on some of Savage Freedom's supply runs. When I visited on Friday, a truckload of National Guardsmen were picking up a free lunch—smoked turkey, with peas and carrots—being distributed by volunteers in the parking lot.
Even the bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration have had to get out of the way: The field behind the Harley-Davidson dealership was granted an emergency designation as a legitimate landing zone.
Smith says this is meant to be a "collaborative" operation, rather than a fully private one. But there are no uniformed cops controlling access, just Travis and his buddy, who declines to speak with me. The National Guardsmen who are here seem to be waiting for orders rather than giving them. What's happening here resembles a militia operation, in the best and truest sense of the term.
"Now that we're three weeks into it, we've had no less than 60 people here. At the height, we had 130 people here every day," Smith says. "It just, it's been miraculous."
Devestation in Swannanoa, North Carolina (Photo by Eric Boehm)
Who will build the roads…and the hot showers?
Any doubts about the necessity of those helicopters disappear as I wind my way into the mountains southeast of Asheville. It's been three weeks, but U.S. Route 74—the main road in this area—is passable only in the strictest sense of the word. Trees have been cut and the mudslides partially cleared, but power lines are down everywhere. In some places, it looks like every third tree was felled by the storm. In others, whole mountainsides came loose and tumbled down.
Where the road wasn't blocked with debris from above, it was washed out from below. After crossing the top of Strawberry Gap, Route 74 follows Hickory Creek as it spills down the side of the eastern continental divide toward the Broad River. In places where floodwaters from the storm came into conflict with anything man-made, the creek won. The road is open now thanks to piles of gravel and steel plates filling some of the washed-out sections. Hastily constructed culverts have replaced destroyed bridges in so many places that I lost count.
"I've never dealt with anything like this, and I hope I never do again," says Jay Alley, who has been the chief at the volunteer fire department in Gerton since 1994. "We had pretty much no roads, no bridges, no power poles, nothing. Had a lot of homes destroyed."
Despite the damage, he's proud to report that the town didn't lose a single life in the flooding. "We actually gained one," he says. "We had a baby born in the middle of all this, so that was really great." The stories that kid will be told.
Other places have not been so lucky. As of October 23, there have been 96 deaths attributed to Helene's impact on North Carolina—seven of them in Henderson County, where the town of Bat Cave (just down the road from Gerton) was nearly wiped out.
Flooding washed out sections of U.S. Route 74, slowing relief efforts. (Photo by Eric Boehm)A message of defiance in Bat Cave, North Carolina (Photo by Eric Boehm)Debris from homes line the roads of western North Carolina. (Photo by Eric Boehm)
Donations and supplies that poured into Gerton overflow onto the driveway outside the firehouse: propane heaters, sleeping bags, warm clothes, and more. A trailer with a massive propane-fueled rotisserie oven—one that's normally used to cook turkeys for church dinners, says Debbie, who offers me a chili dog while I wait to chat with Alley—has been churning out hundreds of hot meals every day for first responders and residents alike.
"It speaks to the generosity of the people who have come to help us," says Alley. "We had lots of faith-based organizations and volunteers who came in and they rebuilt roads and they rebuilt things for everyone in the community."
Wait, even the roads?
"We've had private organizations from Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, just all over the country have been here rebuilding our roads," Alley says. "I don't know how they got here, but we said, 'Hey, go fix this problem,' and they went and fixed it."
Groups with names like God's Pit Crew have poured into North Carolina in the weeks since Helene, armed with the power of prayer, chain saws, and front-end loaders. In a church parking lot near Mills River, I meet a group of volunteers from Pennsylvania as they're packing up a trailer to head home after a week of cutting tree limbs and clearing debris. In two days of driving around, I see more "Texas Strong" decals on trucks and trailers than Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) logos.
The Cajun Navy, a Louisiana-based disaster response team that made headlines in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is here too. At an outpost the group established in the parking lot of a Dollar General in Black Mountain, Chris Woodard is serving corn bread and chili. He'll be here for a week, and then other volunteers will arrive to take his place. World Central Kitchen, the relief group founded by Chef José Andrés, has set up a massive outdoor kitchen in downtown Asheville, where the public water supply was only partially restored this past Friday: For the first time since the storm, toilets could be flushed and residents could take showers, but the water was not yet safe for drinking or cooking.
Outside of the more well-established relief efforts, local networks of volunteers have sprung up around churches, firehouses, and other gathering points. Many rely on the ingenuity of the people running them, or at least a willingness to think outside the box. At BattleCat Coffee in East Asheville, staff are hauling tanks of water from a nearby World Central Kitchen distribution point, and using a jury-rigged pump system to feed it into the espresso machine.
The community pool in Black Mountain has become another of the many ad hoc relief centers in the region: Piles of donated clothes fill the locker rooms, hot food is being grilled on a trailer in the parking lot, and volunteers who traveled from Maryland and Indiana are crashing in the swim team's clubhouse. This one has something that many other do not: hot showers.
"We had an idea and we just went with it," says Heather Hensley, who works as the pool's assistant manager during the summer months. A few days after the flood took out Black Mountain's power and water supply, Hensley and her colleagues realized that the pool could be used to filter the available water—which was unsanitary due to broken pipes—to make it usable. A generator got the filter up and running. Then, another problem: The October sun wasn't warm enough to heat the solar shower bags someone provided. So she called a friend who owns a propane-powered turkey fryer.
Like so many of these off-the-cuff setups, it's the sort of thing that almost certainly violates at least a few of the town's ordinances. Hensley says she's found it's better to ask forgiveness than permission when attending to flood victims' needs.
That approach has turned Hensley into something of a field marshal. Our conversation is interrupted at one point by a volunteer who is in contact with some members of the 101st Airborne Division, which has been deployed to the region. The other woman asks Hensley to decide what task the troops* should be given: Are they needed here to unload a truck of donations scheduled to arrive shortly, or focus on clean-up efforts down the road?
"Did you ever think you'd be giving orders to the 101st Airborne?" I ask her after the volunteer steps away to deliver the message (the troops get clean-up duty, as Hensley has enough volunteers here).
"I'm not," she laughs, "I'm not giving orders."
But, yeah, she is.
Makeshift hot showers in Black Mountain, thanks to a community pool and a turkey fryer (Photo by Eric Boehm)
The road from Black Mountain back to Swannanoa is lined with piles of debris—the guts of homes that were swamped when the Swannanoa River overflowed its banks. The football bleachers from the Asheville Christian Academy have been dragged across the field and crushed like an empty beer can. Mud-logged cars and trucks have been strewn in fields and flushed down the riverbank.
Amid the destruction, the Valley Hope Church has become a hub of activity. Inside, Amy Berry oversees the stockpiles of donated clothes, bedding, furniture, and food that have poured in from as far away as Canada and Connecticut, and now fill the church's rec center.
"It just has been amazing to see the best of humanity," Berry says. "We can always talk about the worst of it, but I have seen the best of it, I really have."
On the church's front lawn, Taylor and Frances Montgomery are serving a full hot dinner of roasted chicken, Tex-Mex soup, parmesan pasta, and vegetables to dozens of families from the area. Kids are playing tag in the playground. The buzz of generators and an approaching autumn chill hang in the air.
"We've seen tears over salad," says Taylor, who has been a chef for more than two decades. "My whole career, I concentrate on learning the next culinary discipline or new trend or how to develop flavor. And not one of those plates has been more important or impactful than the plate I'm handing to a person on the other side of this slide."
In more normal times, Taylor and Frances run the Montgomery Sky Farm and an associated animal rescue center in Leicester, about 10 miles northwest of Asheville. If Smith and his brand of redneck mountain tough guy represent one-half of the western North Carolina cliché, then the Montgomeries are the yin to that yang: crunchy, flannel-wearing folks who talk about "scratch" cooking and run a carefully curated Instagram page. They're also the type who depend on the area's agritourism, which usually peaks in the autumn.
Not this year. With their farm partially flooded by the storm and the tourists staying away, Taylor and Frances hit the road with a mobile kitchen trailer and food that's been provided by fundraising on social media. For two weeks, they've been feeding desperate people in stricken communities across the Black Mountains. They're hoping to keep this up through Thanksgiving, and maybe longer if the donations keep flowing.
"We figured we could sit and cry," says Frances, "or we could be proactive."
Scenes of destruction along the banks of the Swannanoa River (Photo by Eric Boehm)
"We're the ones seeing our friends float away"
The question that will be asked in the wake of Helene is whether FEMA's response was sufficient. For what it's worth, President Joe Biden has already delivered his verdict—"you're doing a heckuva job," Biden told FEMA Director Deanne Criswell on October 9 (an irony-free callback to then-President George W. Bush's questionable praise for then–FEMA chief Michael Brown after Hurricane Katrina).
Many in western North Carolina will have a different view, no doubt. Threats of violence against FEMA personnel earlier this month caused a brief suspension of federal relief efforts in Rutherford County, where the town of Chimney Rock was wiped off the map by the same floodwaters that devastated Gerton and Bat Cave. The man responsible for those threats was quickly arrested, and the recovery efforts resumed.
Threats like that are not helping anyone, obviously, and the people engaged in the actual work on the ground—from first responders like Alley to the redneck airforce leaders like Smith—are quick to dismiss that incident as an outlier. It's no secret that FEMA's efforts are often slow, incompetent, and ineffective, but the aid is accepted for what it is. (And it hasn't been completely insignificant: FEMA says it has shippedover 9.3 million meals, more than 11.2 million liters of water, 150 generators, and more than 260,000 tarps to western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.)
But the people here also know that FEMA can't be trusted with the really important tasks.
"If we weren't here, there wouldn't be people getting warm clothes, because FEMA doesn't give out clothes," says Bob Wright, who is running another of these roadside donation distribution centers, this one in a shopping center parking lot in Swannonoa. Wright works for a local nonprofit, Hearts and Hands, that is distributing heaters, canned food, blankets, and other items alongside plastic bins containing sweaters and jeans in various sizes.
"They give you $750 to go buy some," he adds, gesturing at the nearby Ingles grocery store that's been closed due to damage from the flood as if to underline his point.
In any disaster, a federal response is bound to be insufficient. There will always be the need for people in the affected communities—first responders and other public officials, yes, but also ad hoc volunteer efforts and charity.
Not everyone involved in the recovery is a former Green Beret. Not everyone knows how to fly a helicopter or operate a front-end loader. That's fine. Surviving the first three weeks after Helene required the assistance of farmers and pool managers, of breweries and barbeques, of chefs and fishmongers from the next state—and untold contributions from the wallets of ordinary Americans and the corporate accounts of some of the country's biggest businesses. The overflowing donations, the pallets of bottled water, the fresh food, and the helicopters, too. They all represent the wealth of America, and not in some metaphorical sense but in a very literal one.
"I do not have time to defend what the government is doing. They are doing a lot of hard, dangerous work," says Berry. But grassroots organizations like her church have a vital role to play. "We can respond a lot faster. We're a lot smaller, but they are our neighbors. It is our home. We are going to respond faster because we are the ones standing in the water, in the mud. We are the ones seeing our friends float away."
Down the road, at the Harley-Davidson dealership, Smith and his collaborators are working on a planto ferry huge tanks of clean water into the mountain hollows that might not have regular service restored for months.
"This is a long-term effort. And we've given our word to the community that we will stay and support them as long as it takes for them to get back on their feet," says Smith. "The mission is to get the local economy up and running again, make sure the community and residents of western North Carolina are taken care of, and to remind them on a regular basis that they haven't been forgotten."
CORRECTION: This piece incorrectly described members of the 101st Airborne, which is a division of the U.S. Army.
Growing up in Venezuela, I saw how the country's socialist economic policies made it a struggle to survive. Every day, I would look out my dad's car window and see people rummaging in the trash for food—a reminder that it could be much worse.
In 2016, while some Venezuelans were literally starving to death, President Nicolás Maduro announced that he was launching a new program called CLAP. Maduro claimed that this would be the "beginning of a new economic revolution in the Venezuelan food economy."
Through this program, every Venezuelan family was supposed to receive a box of essential food items on a regular basis, but they rarely arrived. When they did arrive, the food inside was often inedible—especially the powdered milk.
Juan Andrés Ravell uncovered this massive corruption scandal for PBS's Frontline in a recent documentary titled "A Dangerous Assignment." The film is told through the eyes of the investigative reporter Roberto Deniz as he follows where the money allocated for the CLAP program really went. Deniz's investigation led him to Alex Saab, a close associate of Nicólas Maduro, who received the contracts to import food for the CLAP program. Saab became a multimillionaire practically overnight. He built a sprawling mansion in Colombia, married a former Italian supermodel, and bought a lavish property in one of Rome's wealthiest neighborhoods. Ravell told Reason that, "From 2013 on, Alex Saab was Maduro's favorite contractor, but he never talked about him. He was operating in the shadows."
Deniz reported that Saab, as a contractor, was responsible for the inedible food Venezuelan families received through the CLAP program. And that he was paying kickbacks to Maduro. So Saab sued for defamation and libel. For his safety, Deniz fled the country and continued his investigation.
In 2019, Saab was indicted on money-laundering charges and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. The following year, he was en route to Iran when his plane stopped in Cape Verde to refuel and he was captured by the U.S. Then the Venezuelan regime launched a campaign to rehabilitate his image. They were helped by leftist activists, who echoed Maduro's claim that Saab was a hero of the poor, bravely standing up to the imperialist U.S. government.
Saab was extradited to a Miami jail and charged with stealing $350 million and falsifying documents. Then, a twist in the story surprised even Roberto Deniz: During Court proceedings, it was revealed that Saab had been working as a double agent, providing U.S. law enforcement agencies with information on corruption within the Maduro regime. "We still don't know why Maduro would defend Alex Saab, still after knowing that he was an informant for the DEA. Alex Saab's lawyer said that Maduro was aware of everything that Saab had done. So it's hard to tell, it's really hard to tell," Ravell told Reason.
Today, Alex Saab is a free man. Two years after he was extradited to Miami, the Biden administration worked out an exchange for 10 American prisoners. When Saab arrived in Venezuela, he received a hero's welcome from Maduro.
Did Maduro know all along that Saab was working as a U.S. informant? Why was he so adamant about bringing him back from the U.S.? By the end of the film, those remain unsolved mysteries, but overall, the documentary unfolds like a crime thriller. Ravell told Reason that Venezuela maintains a "mafia mentality" and he continues, "Venezuela is what political scientists define as a kleptocratic state—run by people who want to enrich themselves to keep power." The Venezuelan regime attempted to block Venezuelans from accessing "A Dangerous Assignment" after it was released, but that proved impossible. Maduro is staying in power despite losing the recent election, which means that Deniz's investigation won't bring him or Saab to justice anytime soon. However, as depicted in the film, his reporting has helped shift the public conversation. There's now a broad consensus both within Venezuela and internationally that the country is governed not only by a brutal dictatorship, but by a band of depraved criminals who have enriched themselves in part by stealing money intended to buy food for hungry children.
Photo Credits: Alejandro Rojas Dagg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Miguel Gutiérrez/EFE/Newscom; El Informador Diario Online Venezolano, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Abraham Salazar—Efecto Cocuyo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Humberto Matheus/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Humberto Matheus/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Humberto Matheus/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Ramses Mattey/ZUMA Press/Newscom; NoonIcarus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; ZiaLater, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Eneas De Troya from Mexico City, México, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EFE/Newscom; Jesus Vargas/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Gil-Gonzalez Alain/ABACA/Newscom; Jesus Vargas/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Jimmy Villalta / VWPics/Newscom; Javier Campos/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; myself (User:Piotrus), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; VENEZUELA'S PRESIDENCY / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Jeampier Arguinzones/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Jimmy Villalta / VWPics/Newscom; Vuk Valcic/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Jeampier Arguinzones/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom; Eva Plevier/ANP/Newscom; MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EFE/Newscom; VENEZUELA'S PRESIDENCY / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom
Log in
