Somewhere in my recent travels, at a desert campground in rural California, I met a couple who was training for an off-road, cross-country race. I was six days removed from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I had taken in the MyPillow C.E.O. and Donald Trump obsessive Mike Lindell’s Beckettsian “election fraud” symposium, replete with cameos from Steve Bannon, a zoom appearance from Alan Dershowitz, and exceedingly little plausible proof that Trump lost the 2020 election for any reason other than that more people voted for Joe Biden. As I made small talk with my new campmates, the question of American democracy was fresh in my mind. Inevitably, we started talking about my job, and inevitably, their long-buried feelings about Trump emerged.