he marble atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, near the Capitol, felt unusually empty and tense on a recent June morning. A few days earlier, in Minnesota, a man who reportedly compiled a hit list of forty-five Democratic elected officials had killed a state legislator and her husband and shot a state senator and his wife. In Los Angeles, F.B.I. agents tackled and handcuffed the California senator Alex Padilla when he tried to question Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, about the immigration raids that had swept the city. The mood was such that the slightest hint of dissent—implied in my corner of the atrium by a clutch of young bureaucrats huddled around neon poster boards—was enough to draw the suspicion of a police officer. “If you protest, I’m going to have to arrest you,” he told them.
