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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unleashed in today's episode of the show, if you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, This American Life Big.

From Chicago, this American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Raise your hand if you are in Georgia, ready to start here in balance and fight for every vote.

1:00 p.m. Wednesday, the day after the election, Democrat volunteer Jim Hood was training on them for 500 other Democrat volunteers are going to go out.

And Cura ballots in Georgia.

Cure means tracking down voters whose mounty ballots had a problem, the signature, whatever, and they've been rejected so they don't count.

Cheering is the word they use for fixing the ballots.

In other words, you hear a lot rescuing all eyes in this country and around Georgia right now. Take it all. Get rid of that excess energy, all the numbers we're about to change.

Normally, this is a super polished training, but it is. I have not been to sleep.

You can see how they could feel like all of this could come down to them in Georgia.

It was so close, so close all week between the president and Joe Biden. Three out of nearly five million votes cast three times. The candidates were just eleven hundred votes apart.

And the trainers explained to the group that there are over 5000 votes out there, that they can cure mail in ballots and provisional ballots. So after training, people found out, get on phones, knock on doors.

His troublesome drivers, a college them and says. It's Wednesday night in the Atlanta suburbs. Marla and his volunteers stopped by to find Trevor.

OK, you pick up a rejected absentee ballot list. And so we're just tracking down and seeing if we're to resolved there so it's not counted. The woman at the door says, well, it's not over yet. He has until Friday at six.

Who cares about how gives her a packet of materials and explains that he basically just has to sign an affidavit and photograph that and his photo ID and email them into the county back in the car.

Describes how she ended up deciding to volunteer for this after seeing President Trump win so many voters state after state just the night before election night.

You know, a lot of women of color, African-American women like myself, had a lot of anger to express this morning. Even when we realize we're like we think Biden is going to pull this out, we believe this, but my God, it should have been this close. And what does that say? And, you know, there's a lot of anger to get out about that. And a lot of the women who are white allies also, you know, it's just like we were just in our heart to realize we never thought it would be this close.

But by the time noon and one p.m. came around, it's like, OK, we'll come back to that later. We've got to get these votes.

It's tedious work, a volunteer named Erica Meyer, who's doing this by phone, told me that in her three hour shift on Wednesday, she reads maybe one person for every 10 calls she made.

It's definitely mostly voicemail's. How many pilots do you fix? Five in three hours. Yeah, it's not a very big return on investment. Like, how do you feel about that?

Does it feel like just a drop in the ocean? Do you feel like does it feel important? I kind of swing back and forth on a pendulum of political despair. You know, sometimes it feels like especially if I have a successful conversation with a voter, then you're like, yes, that was so great. Then you kind of ride that high for a little while.

But when I look at the clock and see how much time all these calls have taken and this, yeah, as you say, a drop in the ocean.

So there's a big zoom training the Democrats did in Georgia today for volunteers carrying votes and doing the training. They said that before you help the voter, be sure that the voter is voting for the Democrats.

Were you told that in your training now? I don't recall hearing that, but I do know that in our script, one of the first questions is, were you supporting Democrats on your ballot?

And then if they say no, are you supposed to hang up, thank them for their time and hang up? Yeah.

Would you be able to do it? You know, I mean, it's you know, it's really there's no pretense that this is about democracy and counting every ballot, you know, at that point, as you said, about winning.

I mean, if somebody said, you know, I voted for Trump, but I'm really disappointed that my vote isn't going to count. I couldn't sleep at night if I had if I knew that I had suppressed their vote so you would help them. Yeah, yeah. We can't say we want it and then not do it.

Have you had to do that? Well, I had one person yell at me, Trump 20, 20 and then hang up so I didn't have to do it.

The program this week with states meticulously trying to count every ballot while crowds show up, demanding that they either stop counting the ballots or continue counting the ballots ignored by the president going on TV and straight up lying about what is happening in the rooms where the votes are being counted. We have stories of people all over the country living through this weird I don't know what to call it, gravedigger's limbo of uncertainty that we have all been floating through since Tuesday. Speaking for myself, checking the news compulsively, The Washington Post called the day after the election this Wednesday a humpday for the ages.

All of us wondering, how is this going to end?

Our fellow citizens going through that. Stay with us.

Hagwon, Virginia, so Giglio's, a reporter, has been following militia groups for the last year and interviewing the men in them, including lots of guys who've been bracing for civil war over the last few weeks. And President Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to go to polling stations and, quote, watch very carefully on Election Day. Mike wondered if any of these groups and those guys he knew would heed the call. Here's Mike when I called, Joe Klam, the leader of a militia in Virginia, called the Ridge Runners, he told me that's exactly what they're getting ready to do.

So I joined them for a pre-election training session in the Appalachian Mountains one chilly Saturday morning three weeks ago. Joe wouldn't tell me the location over the phone, so I met him in about a dozen other guys in camo and McDonald's and followed them to a large farm. So they start the day standing at attention behind an abandoned building.

But there are fifteens parade rest. Morning, gents, glad to see you all here. Thank you all for coming out. Just real quick, we're going to go over a couple of things a day. That's Joe.

He's a muscular twenty nine year old who looks exactly like the former Marine sergeant.

He tells me he is just want to kind of bring this all the forefront of all of your minds. With the election on the way. We need to stay vigilant right now. We're all I've been collaborating with a lot of the other group commanders in the area. Each group is going to have a set number of polling sites that we're going to be responsible for. Each polling site is going to have to hopefully three Greyman operating at that site Greyman.

That means men in plain clothes trying to blend into the crowds at the polling stations. Joe tells me what they're looking for as groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, who they believe could disrupt the election, intimidate voters or commit fraud. They get this from the president.

Trump in right wing media have been raising these fears without evidence for months. Everyone enjoys militia is white. The question of whether militias are synonymous with white nationalists always comes up with groups like this, and they almost always reject that label. All the places that Joe imagines might be hot spots on Election Day or nearby cities with lots of people of color. But he and his members insist they're not racist. Before January, when Joe started the group, most of these guys didn't know each other.

Joe was one of the most intense people I've met in the militias. And when he talks, people tend to snap to attention. He tells me stories about fighting as a black ops soldier and losing friends and killing enemies. I checked with the Marines and they tell me they have no record of the service. Joe claims that's because it's classified. When I asked people what drew them to the group, they talk about Joe, his charisma.

Here's a member called Savage.

I went to a muster and with feel for a group and that group just basically wanted to stand around and talk. And there's nothing wrong with that, but don't call yourself a militia if you just want to stand around and talk politics. Group when he come up and deliver his thing, they talked about training. And I mean, I don't want to get out and shoot rounds down range for fun. You know, who doesn't want to train and be a part of something?

A lot of the day seems like the guys are just here to bond and have fun, Jolies the men through six hours of drills, starting with Peaty and then moving to shooting positions and room clearing.

So the initial contact, so contact from 200 meters meters, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Moving through the running a drill here where the idea is that they learn how to cover each other. Right.

Maybe when I spend time with these groups, I'm always wondering how seriously you take the idea that they might really engage in violence. On the one hand, they're giving each other nicknames, slapping each other on the back and saying bang. But at the same time, they really do believe the country's in danger, that they might need to turn their guns on their fellow citizens one day. And they buy into all the unsupported claims Trump makes about liberals bent on election fraud and violence and the need to stop them, and they think they're the ones to do it.

Nearly all the militiamen I've spoken to this year believe that Democrats commit massive voter fraud in 2016 and they've been doing it again this year with mail in ballots and early voting shows worry the 2020 election could be stolen. Did it matter to you that Trump said that?

Well, yeah, of course he did, because if, you know, considering all the access to information that he has that we don't know if he's dropping these little tidbits, there's something that people like me need to pay attention to. So you think that he's basing that on real information? Do you think it's possible that he's playing politics?

Um, I don't I don't think so. He seems like more of a straightforward kind of guy. I think that he's not the type of person to play politics. Sometimes I wish the people in these militia groups could hear how much they sound like people I covered in countries that have come undone. I spent a lot of time in eastern Ukraine in early 2013 with the pro-Russian activists who eventually plunged the region into a war. They were going on social media and tune in to Russian propaganda and convinced themselves that their countrymen were out to destroy them.

They tell me that bands of Nazis were coming from Kiev to kill them. I was struck by the way people had to convince themselves that the other side was absolutely out to get them, was bent on their destruction in order to take that step into real violence. It's not that I think that would happen in Ukraine. What happened in America? The talk of violence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the stakes for you are they are the stakes like just an election, like, you know, if Trump loses, OK, maybe we can win again in four years.

Like, no, I really believe that anybody who gets in after Trump, if you know they're liberal, it's going to be the downfall of America for sure. You know, this election is going to be some sort of a turning point for good or bad. It's going to be a turning point. Let's roll out all of it. It's Tuesday morning, Election Day, Jones and his guys are split between two pickup trucks. I'm in the backseat of Joe's.

Everyone with me is dressed in battle gear and they're armed to the teeth. Joe's wearing a bulletproof vest with four or five ammo clip strapped to it and a pistol in a holster that was in the passenger seat. Matt, like a guy in his 30s, has a big knife strapped to his own body armor in addition to all the ammo clips. And he's wearing a pair of noise canceling headphones and calls on them and talk to both of them have loaded air 15s in their laps.

The plan is to do, as the president suggested, drive to every polling station in their county in Virginia and look for problems. Joe leads the way.

So we're just looking for any signs of, you know, people, you know, up to no good, possibly trying to deter people or intimidate.

Anybody had asked earlier what kind of people they were looking for. Joe said thugs when I asked what that meant. He said, people from Black Lives matter for many folks. I wasn't sure how he'd know whether a person was a member of a group like that or whether they were even that many of them in this part of the country.

Well, first of all, Antifa would be dressed in all black. Probably BLM would be, you know, just they would have all kinds of BLM sign signage and things like that.

We spoke to a polling station in the parking lot just out there in the open.

There are people milling around and then a bunch of guys with guns just watching them all and change location to our right over here by that white vehicle and the picnic shelter.

Yeah, I was just thinking, that sounds good. Go ahead and move.

Doug, the grey man gets ready to go in. He's in his 40s with a beard. He also has an easy demeanor, which is probably the reason they picked him for the job. He's wearing jeans, a fleece and sunglasses. And you'd have to look closely to notice that there's a wire running down from the back of his hat, which is connected to a radio so he can be in touch with the guys. We hang back in the pickup while Doug goes in.

After a few minutes, he casually walks back to us. So what do you see?

They're just people talking to is probably 40 voters in there, more people showing up all the time. Everybody is in a good mood, cheerful, just just looked around, come back out by the 360 sweep of the building outside of the building. Nothing at all that was suspicious. Nothing. Nothing.

And we're back on the road with Joe leading the way that pretty much every polling station when Doug walks in, this is how it goes.

How. Hey, how are you doing over there? I've already voted earlier today. I just I just need to check it every time I go. Thank you.

Most of the day's driving, driving and waiting, waiting, driving. It's a big county spread across winding mountain roads. We drop in and out of self service. Sometimes Joe gets turned around when his Google Maps goes on the fritz. Matt, the guy in the passenger seat, is good at filling the idle time.

He's ready to sign off on just about anything without I don't know if you watch The Sopranos, but, you know, Tony used the I mean, the definition of Narcissus and talks about cars. If I had to pick one muscle car, I would probably go either 69 charger Artie. Or the 71 Jimmy Carter, the good old days, like we used to argue about, like football, you talk shit about sport, people don't even do that anymore.

You know, they're arguing about this or that or whatever, because love handles even the skinny as I am. I like to pop.

I don't want to go away either. I like working out like crazy. I eat right now, you know, I do a lot of sugar and stuff like that, but. The confrontation they suited up for never happens, we don't see Antifa or Black Lives Matter or anyone blocking the polls or intimidating voters or committing fraud. At our last stop, we do see someone lingering outside a polling station.

I woke up to the entrance with Doug and see a woman sitting nearby. She's an older white woman with a bag that has a blue sticker for Mark Warner. Democratic Senator Doug walked right by her with polite hello. And then we're inside having another awkward conversation with the poll workers.

Not major. You had a pretty good turnout today everywhere. All right, good deal. Yes, ma'am, I absolutely. When we walk back outside, the woman still there and I know it's her and Doug, a little suspicious that he walk in and out so quickly, she asks him if he needs help.

I've already voted. I was just talking to some people.

Doug goes back to the car and I decide to go and talk with the woman. She's Janet take a die hard liberal Democrat. She says she comes here every election to hand out campaign literature. She's allowed to do that just outside the white line on the pavement, like a lot of people have been anxious about being out on Election Day.

I'm pleasantly surprised. My daughter was worried about me a little bit. But I'm like I'm old. And I just I think it's important.

I mentioned that I saw her watching Doug, but it was a little odd when he comes kind of zooming in and out. But he was nice. This group is a militia group, actually. They were pretty nice.

They were nice.

Joe and the heavily armed guys in the car are probably exactly the kind of people her daughter was worried about. But Janet tells me she's not going to be intimidated.

I'm like, what are they going to do, shoot me? My daughter really was worried, like, don't do it. She thought maybe a group like that would she just didn't know what to think.

So. But I. I'm just like, what? I don't know. I'm not going to live in a country that I feel uncomfortable going to my polling place and doing normal democratic things. It's like, do I can bring my bear spray? You know, it just seems ridiculous.

I head back to the truck. I tell Joe that the woman I was talking to is local Democrat. And she told me Doug seemed like a nice guy. He's really struck by that. He jumps out of the truck, stillness, full battle gear and suddenly determined to meet her. Yeah.

So people come and shake your hand. I really appreciate you being out here and helping these people out here. And I mean, obviously, we're like two opposite sides. But I think it's great that people who have differing views can be civil and just get along, you know? Right.

I mean, I've been doing this since 2007. Yeah.

And there's usually if John's intimidated by Joe with his body armor and ammo clips and pistol, she doesn't show it.

Well, yeah. We, um, we've been kind of patrolling around all day. So I, I, I think it's it's a little excessive.

But they talked for a few minutes. He's so big, just smiles and looks him in the eyes and picks an argument with him about the Electoral College. I think at the end they do a little high fives.

All right. We're going to head out of here. You enjoy the rest of your night when Joe gets back to the car.

I know that he's energized by the encounter. It was the only time of the day I saw him drop his warrior persona. Great day, he tells me. Not long afterwards, the guys packed it up and went home. They found no evidence of fraud, no intimidation and disruption. They never got a chance to protect the vote or engage the enemy. And it was a relief to see that this was totally fine with them. The next day, I called Joe.

It was Wednesday. The news was moving towards a Biden victory and President Trump was already crying fraud. Joe was too.

Up till right now, I'm not very happy with what I'm saying. Honestly, I think that the other side is trying to introduce false ballots into the system and then they're just going to try to rig it and make it so that Biden wins.

What makes you think that they're doing that?

There is some. Fishy stuff going on up there in Michigan and a couple other places that they should have already called for Trump, but they haven't.

The president has been pushing unsubstantiated claims of election rigging in Michigan and other crucial states. So if it ends up being that Biden is declared the winner, what do you think? There could be a way that you could just say, yeah, that's probably what happened and believe it?

Absolutely not. No chance. Yes, no chance. From everything that we saw and experienced leading up to the election, there's no way that Trump would lose a fair election.

There is no way your own experience yesterday was that you guys checked on the polling stations and everything was running smoothly and you didn't see any fraud?

No, honestly, because, you know, the fact that people were able to go and cast their vote, you know, unimpeded doesn't really have anything to do with what goes on with those ballots and stuff, you know, after the people go and cast them.

Joe tells me he's sure that if Biden wins, some kind of violence is inevitable. He says he'll end up fighting someone Black Lives Matter Antifa. He's not sure. What if at some point Trump were to concede and say he accepts that Biden was a practice president. Now, could you change your mind?

Absolutely not.

Mike Giglio, he wrote about his experiences covering civil wars overseas in his book Shatter the Nations back to New York and Germany.

So four years ago, the day after Donald Trump won that election, reporter Stephanie Foo met two Army officers at a diner to talk to them about the new boss. Those guys are in the same unit, close friends, but they did not agree on politics at all.

Why do you like each other? I don't know. Why do we like each other? We disagree on almost everything. You know why? Because I know that he'll have my back and help and I'll have his regardless of what he believes. All those ill-founded most of it is. I give my life for him. I save my own life. Not enough.

He knows where we're good at the time, the way back and forth about what they thought the next four years are going to be like with President Trump as commander in chief. Whether it meant they were more likely to be deployed to a conflict zone, how it would affect morale and the possibility that Donald Trump might start a nuclear war, he'll be fine.

He's not he's not going to drop nukes on people. I don't know. I think he's incredibly uneducated about it. So here's the thing about the codes that people don't realize people. It's not like he has like a piece of paper in his pocket. It's like, oh, here, the nuclear call, it doesn't work that way.

The guy who, like President Trump said the officer with the nuclear football would prevent Donald Trump from randomly nuking somebody. The Hillary Clinton supporter was not so sure anyway.

Stephanie checked in with the two of them again earlier this week, one of those in the states, one of them stationed in Germany.

The biggest thing that happened to these guys in the last four years actually had nothing to do with Trump. They both had babies.

This is actually better. I can hear you guys pretty good. So, Imlay, somebody decided to take off their diaper and chew on it. So we were dealing with that. And now we're terrible parents and he's crying hysterically because how dare we not let him eat his own feces?

So, God, you reminds me so much already. Well, don't worry. Your daughter's not too far behind, Tom.

These aren't their real names. But Chet and Tom voted exactly how I expected them to win this election. Tom voted for Biden. Chet again voted for Trump.

But in 2016, Chet had been a really hard core Trump supporter. He really wanted an outsider. But now that the outsider is an insider, he feels more agnostic.

And maybe a little part of his indifference is because of Trump's role as their boss, like the time Trump made the comment saying, why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here?

Chat wasn't crazy about that.

Neither was Tom, the Biden supporter who is deployed in Africa.

When that went down, his comments about shithole countries definitely impacted my job. The US military has training exercises across the world with partners. I happen to be in a position at the time where I was running a group of teams that were in African countries. And as you're sitting there planning for these training events, these comments come out and it's just, you know, like. Your partners are kind of like, is this what you guys think about us?

So it's what did you have to tell them? I basically talked through, you know, like that doesn't represent US military's position on our partnerships. And honestly, like, sometimes it comes down just like bullshitting and having, like, friendly relations with folks.

And I've had similar experiences to. I'm a Trump supporter, right, Magga, 20, 20, but yes, it it does make your job more difficult. Like I'm not going to defend the fact that when he says something, it's like, OK, it's time to brace.

They weren't totally unhappy with his performance. Both Chet and Tom agreed that Trump strongman personality did come in handy. Sometimes they like that he engaged with North Korea and supported the assassination of Iranian General Carson Soleimani. But the thing that's affected them the most during the last four years is the same thing we've all dealt with. The thing that isn't going to magically go away no matter who wins.

I feel like the thing that's very clear to me is that it really feels like there are two Americas right now.

Yeah. Does it feel that way in the military?

Yes. Oh, yeah. That's Chet. I have colleagues on both sides and it's awkward, like you used to talk about it more.

And now people don't want to talk about politics at all.

Yeah, like when I when I went to Iraq in 2008, it was like people will be like, I'm voting for Obama or people I'm going to vote for McCain. But there was there wasn't any, like charged racism attached to it. Like you weren't a racist.

If you voted for McCain, you could talk about it and nobody would get offended.

And like now it's just like, you know, like apparently I'm a supremacist because I vote for Trump, according to some people, you know? I mean, so I'm just very much like whatever, man. Like I'm voting for who I want to vote for. You can do the same. I don't want to talk about it.

You know, one of the moments that bugs chat the most is from his last deployment.

One of his friends was a black woman who absolutely hated Trump and she hated all of the white Trump supporting soldiers around her, too. She did hang out with Chad. He thinks it's because he's Asian-American. And it just put me in an awkward position all the time.

And I would always get asked by both sides, like, why are you hanging out with them? And I'd be like, Really, man? Like, we're all on the same team. Like, who cares?

Tom agrees. He says that in the military, the mindset should be that there's an enemy and it's out there hiding in a cave in Afghanistan somewhere, not in the next aisle at the stop and shop.

When I was watching this stuff on the news with the the Black Lives Matter protests and National Guard troops were getting called in, like I kept thinking like that it's the worst fucking job. I would never, ever want to do that. Right. Like the you know, these are people from your community and you're getting called in to do something like no one in the military wants to do this. No, unless, again, like when it comes to emergency situations, I think everybody's all for volunteering to do that in the case of, say, a hurricane.

But nobody wants to let go in and try and be a policeman. That's not our job. No, I don't know.

I follow like some military Instagram's and one of them is like, I killed people in Afghanistan. I'll kill these people today.

You know, those people are full of shit idiots. Those people probably fail their psych exam. A lot of international relationships have been tested by the Trump presidency, but not 10 times, you guys are still friends.

Yeah, I mean, but to be totally honest, that's because we have a toxic friendship where we just make fun of each other the whole time. So this is just one more thing like we can do.

Yeah, we hated each other long before Trump even decided to run for president.

So, I mean, we just built on top of that hatred and now we have this hate mountain over the Friendship Bridge. It's really a beautiful thing. OK.

Tom says that the military creates an environment where people have to trust and communicate with each other, even if you don't like each other, which is not an attitude America seems to have these days about our democracy. I talked to them Wednesday, the day after the election. Tom said he'd be pretty horrified if Trump won to disrupt, if Biden wins. He said basically whatever. Both said they'd respect either outcome. Stephanie felt she used to be a producer on our program.

She's now writing a memoir about healing from complex PTSD. Coming up, somebody who thought his life is going to change a lot, depending on who becomes president, though, now it's not so clear. That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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Better help Dotcom T.L. That's better help dotcom Tiao. It is American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program squeaker, I don't know if I should meet here, how many minutes today we spent arguing over whether to call the episode erectile dysfunction. Squeaker was our classy choice. Anyway, our show this week is stories from all over about this strange week we've all just lived through waiting for election results. And of course, there's some people the outcome of the presidential election might have a very direct effect on their lives.

Take, for instance, the people living in the tent camp that's just over the border from Texas in Matamoros, Mexico, a camp filled with people seeking asylum in the United States who've been sent there under the president's remaining Mexico policy on election night, they held a vigil all night long until 5:00 in the morning. Apparently, the passengers who put this together tried to keep it apolitical, stick with prayers and songs, but by the end of the vigil, in the early morning hours, the last pastor who took the stage said the thing that apparently lots of them have been thinking all night.

He said, I hope Joe Biden wins. And somebody was there, said it was like everybody finally had a chance to let out their feelings. They cheered, they danced. They've heard Joe Biden promise to reform immigration and his first 100 days in office. Which brings us to Act three, Act three, Louisiana. Ben Calhoun has this story of somebody else who's not from this country.

He's been following the election as closely as he can.

Jonathan, who was in an ICE detention center in Louisiana, told me that this year's presidential race actually solved the problem in the detention centres he's been in. He's been moved around to a few. Jonathan told me the recurring problem was with the TVs, take the ice detention center. I called him in. There was this small triangular room.

He said there is a small, small triangular room attached to the dome that we want to watch TV, get into that room and watch TV.

The problem with the detention center is sort of the same with any TV in America. People can't agree what to watch. Should we watch English TV and Spanish TV?

Should there be time for use? Should there be time for music? Should there be time for football? Should there be time for football? Foreign program. So it's all part of the problem.

Jonathan told me during the 18 months he's been in ICE detention, one of the few times this wasn't an issue like at all was the presidential debates this fall. Everyone, Jonathan said, wanted to see those. I called Jonathan the week before the election because I wanted to talk to someone in our immigration system whose case could potentially be affected by it. I wondered how the election looked from where they were. Jonathan said he'd talked to other detainees about the election.

He'd been talking to guards to most of them, he told me, Rehbein supporters. But yeah, lots of people were wondering how the election might change their cases, including him. Jonathan Sturdee is from Cameroon and he came to the U.S. in 2019 seeking asylum. He's been stuck in detention ever since.

I think all that boils down to the administration of the current government. So based on the information on what I'm seeing personally, from my own personal view, point of view of it by the win, I was hopefully, I think a little bit better. Under President Trump, asylum seekers like Jonathan are getting deported, even ones with strong evidence that they're political refugees who will be tortured or killed if they return to their home countries. Jonathan, I should tell you, that is not his real name.

I'm calling him that because he has family back in Cameroon and he has good reason to worry about their safety. Jonathan is part of an English speaking minority that's been persecuted by Cameroon's French speaking majority and its longtime autocratic president, Paul Biya, that whole situation's gotten more and more violent. Jonathan wasn't part of that. He was a businessman. A grocery wholesaler bought stuff from farmers to sell in town, and he started the business to support his mom.

After his dad died, basically, Jonathan got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in this barber shop when it got raided by soldiers. He and 14 others got thrown in jail and they were beaten and tortured for nearly a month. At one point, a few men were taken out and they never came back. The soldier told the rest of them that they were all going to get killed. Then one day, a warning. This is pretty graphic.

One day, an officer took Jonathan and one other man at gunpoint and he led them outside to a truck. He told them to clean it up and Jonathan looked inside it.

See stance of blood stains of blood, which like be human beings, human bodies and particles.

Jonathan says there was blood all over the inside particles of flesh. He started to clean and then at some point he noticed that the soldier was distracted and talking to someone at the window of opportunity.

I said, I will tell you why I'm trying to save my life and to stay on dequeue.

Jonathan says he slipped around the corner of the building and then he ran through a cornfield and he just kept running. Eventually, he got to a cousin's house and then eventually escaped to Ecuador.

I just want to say Jonathan's account of all these details, it's all well supported by documents and photos and legal affidavits. Among the documents, there's a warrant for Jonathan's arrest for, quote, terrorism, secession and insurrection. Jonathan told me if the government gets its hands on him, chances he'll be killed 100 percent. That's what he said, 100 percent. Jonathan's attorney told me under a different presidential administration than President Trump's, he thinks his asylum case would have a much better shot.

So after escaping, Jonathan went through nine countries, at some point, someone gave Jonathan a piece of advice that would end up being really important. Is it rip your passport up? It'll make it harder for anyone to send you back to Cameroon. So Jonathan did that. In the end, he made it to the U.S. made into ice custody. I asked Jonathan why he didn't seek asylum in any of the other nine countries, and he told me it was simple.

He didn't know enough about any of those other countries to know if they would protect him or if they'd send him back or I know from what I know about, you know, just there was no like or of that particular human rights. That's one best thing that I know about that I knew before coming down the country that protects human rights. If there was a country that I believe will protect me. I love the ocean because all I needed was just protection is the.

Yeah, all I knew was just protection.

A judge ordered Jonathan to be deported. The only reason he and his lawyer thought he hadn't been is because Jonathan had taken that advice and destroyed his passport back in Panama. For months, ICE officers have been asking Jonathan to sign this document that would apparently let them send him back to Cameroon. Jonathan has been refusing, telling them that he'll be tortured and killed. Ice, in response told Jonathan they would hold him in indefinite detention until he signed an ice.

For their part, they started leaning on Jonathan harder and harder. You have to sign this. Recently, he told me that situation came to a head when an ICE agent he knew led him into a room.

He said he is not going to listen to anything for me. His job is for me to sign this and for it to force me to send me back to my country.

Jonathan got on his knees and begged that he'd be killed. The officer wasn't hearing. He said he needed a picture of Jonathan signing to repeat it.

He told me his job is for me to sign this thing and for me to take the photo. So he even tried to grab my hat or duplicitously took a photo photo of me. I was bleeding across I dungu the issue, not abuse to me.

He grabbed your hand, not the total amount of photo.

All of this only stopped, Jonathan says, when a female officer opened the door and asked what was going on. She called the other officers over to her and they talked to her. Jonathan couldn't really hear them. Then he was allowed to go call his lawyer.

After Jonathan and I talked, we agreed that he would call me the day after the election at five p.m., I wanted to hear his reaction to whatever results or non results we'd have by then, but that never happened. Because the morning after the election, when everyone was waking up to a map with eight states still suspended in gray, I got a voicemail from Jonathan's lawyer.

Isn't it true that they've moved him somewhere? I don't know where. I've no idea where. I can't get a hold of anybody at ICE or the correctional center. Anyway, I'm going to be busy trying to find him. I'll talk to David. Ruth Hargrove, Jonathan's lawyer, couldn't find him, she'd woken up the morning after the election to see four missed calls on her phone, like this morning at like five o'clock in the morning.

But I don't know. I don't know why I missed it. But then his aunt called me and said he was being moved.

And Ruth told me the day before Election Day, the Jonathan told her about this unusual incident where ICE had taken him in to identify his belongings in a property room.

And they asked about his sponsor, which he's got an aunt in Maryland who's offered to take him in while he tries to get asylum in this country. Jonathan told Ruth he was hopeful that that's what was up. He was finally getting out this morning, Secretary, but Ruth was suspicious. She'd gotten this email from an activist group about a deportation flight to Cameroon on November 10. This morning, she'd been getting increasingly nervous that Jonathan might get put on it.

And so that morning after the election, when Jonathan was just removed from the Louisiana detention center, Ruth started scrambling, just trying to figure out where exactly he was, where he was going. When we talked, she was still reeling. OK, so and I just found out, I think he's on his way to a staging facility in Alexandria, Virginia, Louisiana. And that's a big staging area for flights out. Ruth told me she was trying every legal avenue she could think of her she had and confirmed it 100 percent from ICE that Jonathan was being deported.

But she was increasingly sure had to be that she thought. Before I play you this last piece of tape, I need to tell you a few things about Ruth. She's no softy. She's a former prosecutor. She's the wife of a former Navy SEAL and DEA agent. OK, but so the first time we talked, she told me she had this kind of big worry around the election and around Jonathan, she was worried that even if Joe Biden won, the Trump administration officials would go on a scorched earth sort of tear with detainees like Jonathan and that he'd be deported as part of that.

This is what. This is what I thought was going to happen, actually, and I don't know if I told it to you or to or to someone else, but the way I think of these people is that. They they didn't have confidence that Trump was going to win. Maybe they think maybe they were wrong. Then once he goes back to bed. I can't save them. You know. If I could get a hearing here, if I could give him a fair hearing and he would be found to have suffered terrible persecution of.

It's in great danger of future persecution, and you only have to show that there's a 10 percent chance that he'll have a future persecution. But there's a warrant for his arrest and the government has it. And I'll be there. And, you know, the ICE officer I talked to last time, I thought it was going to be deported when I said, you know, he has an arrest warrant. He said, oh, yeah, he has an arrest warrant.

The military will be there waiting for him at the airport. I mean, they know you know, they know.

Thursday, as election results were still gathering in news headlines, I got a call from Jonathan who was in a detention center in Texas, and he filled me in on what had happened the morning after the election. He told me an ICE officer came to see him around 5:00 a.m. I told Jonathan to take his stuff.

They were going to the airport. Jonathan says he begged them the whole way there, told him that if he was deported, he would be killed at the airport. He told me he resisted. He refused to get out of the vehicle, but the officers dragged him on to a plane which took him and some other Cameroonians to Texas. He was told he would be there for a few days. Unclear how many, but that he was there to be deported.

I contacted ICE about Jonathan's situation. In a statement, a spokesperson said he'd been, quote, afforded extensive legal processes and was ultimately found by a federal judge to have no legal basis to remain in the United States. And, quote, They declined to give any information about when he might be deported, though an ICE officer confirmed to Ruth that Jonathan would be in a plane early next week. Before I got off the phone with Jonathan on Thursday, I asked him if he knew what would happen if he arrived in Cameroon.

He said that he'd been trying to reach relatives who might be able to help him. I have no idea what awaits me, he said. Just kept repeating that. He told me, other than talking to his lawyer Ruth and trying to reach family for help, he'd been spending all of his time praying to.

Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our show. Look for Detroit and a bunch of cities around the country this week, Republicans have congregated at election centers where votes are being tallied, protesting, chanting for the county to stop. Or in the case of Arizona, where President Trump is behind the vote count, Janick, for the counting to continue.

We wondered what it would be like to be inside one of those counting rooms trying to do your job with all that chaos going on outside. Emanuel Barrett talked to a woman who was inside the vote counting room in Detroit when Trump supporters tried to get inside, chanted, banged on the windows.

Callea Gastón lives in Detroit. She's a news junkie for this year's presidential election. She kept thinking she'd volunteer. And on Tuesday night, she saw her chance. A Facebook post asking for poll watchers to watch the counting of mail in ballots in Detroit. Is that a big convention center? On Wednesday morning, she goes through training, then she walks into the room where there are 134 tables where votes are being processed, she's assigned a partner in an aisle of tables to watch.

And even though it's my first time, I was like, I'm in the game. So you got to you know, I've actually heard this to Trump. Supporters say that they say democracy is a contact sport. And if you're not in the game and then you can't complain in the outcome, you can't complain if you don't win. And so as a former athlete, for me, I was like, OK, it's game time.

You know, each state has their own rules for people watching.

In Michigan, Republicans and Democrats are allowed to have one challenger per table. Challengers can challenge a ballot. And then there are also poll watchers like Kalaya who cannot challenge votes or ballots but can observe the counting. And honestly, it's all pretty tame. Scalia stands on the side of the room, looking around, taking notes, raising small concerns with supervising staff, like if a person isn't wearing their mask properly, that's how our day starts out.

She's just one of hundreds of people in a room watching hundreds of other people count ballots.

But a couple hours in, things change around, I want to say between like 11 and 12. That's when I noticed really just a shift in the climate in the room. People started. Yeah. So people started just getting more chippy.

Most of the Republican poll watchers were doing their job without issues, but a handful of them started to become disruptive.

I saw with my own eyes at my table the way I was, you know, berating people as they were handling ballots. They were being asked what their political party was. And these were election workers who were handling ballots. Are you a Democrat or a Republican? I saw people challenging ballots before they even got to the table. So making blanket statements. I'm challenging every ballot access, you know, as this table. And it's like, well, there's no ballots at the table.

She was told this might happen in training, that people may cause a scene or try and distract or slow down vote counting.

I think for me, you know, it was very emotional at a certain point. I saw a lot of colleagues, a lot of friends, a lot of elders in our community who were there. And so for me, seeing elders of our community, people who had dedicated years to do this, be berated and physically intimidated by a lot of younger white people. Hate it was it was the optics were very disconcerting. You also had people in there talking about their Second Amendment rights.

And so eventually people started to be escorted out of the room.

At this point, Joe Biden was starting to take the lead in Michigan and there were growing rumors and disinformation spreading online about election fraud in Detroit. More poll watchers showed up in the lobby demanding to be let into the counting room. The building officials refused, saying they had too many people in there already, including over 500 Republican and Democratic pollwatchers. Even more people gathered outside the building and what you ended up with was a group of mostly white people chanting Stop the vote, stop the count, and a city of mostly black voters.

The thing that I have thought about over and over again during this election cycle is that black people exercising their political will is seen as cheating.

Just this Thursday.

The president called to cities with large black populations, Detroit and Philadelphia, quote, two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country with no evidence for this at all, and declared that these cities, quote, cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race Wednesday afternoon at the convention center as a crowd outside kept getting bigger, clearly wasn't aware of any of it.

She wasn't near the windows. But then things slowed down at her tables and she took a stroll. I walked to the front by the media pan and that's when I saw literally a man climbing the windows. You know, I saw people screaming, pushing on the doors. And one of my close friends was there checking in observers and challengers, and she was just really overwhelmed. And then later on, you could feel it. You could feel and you could see the windows shaking while we were in there.

And like, what did you think might happen? You know, my worst fear was, I hope one no one opens the door. Are they going to try to force us to stop counting the votes? Are they going to try to physically harm us? Our people are armed. I mean, we're Michigan, right, where you had people stormed the state capitol with guns just a month earlier. Right. Had members of the militia, a plot uncovered to try to kidnap our governor.

Carleo was concerned about what was happening outside, but she had another feeling as she was standing there watching people inside pride. They all just kept working, kept counting the votes. Around seven p.m., Koya headed home, she felt relieved to be done, but Thursday this morning when I woke up, I just busted out crying and I was like, what?

What's happening? You know, I like, why all of that that emotion. And it was it took me a minute. And I was like, that was traumatic, right? Like what occurred last night was traumatic. But trauma isn't the main feeling Collier took away from this experience. She feels emboldened. She says she's definitely going to pull out again. Emmanuel Berry is the executive editor of our show at five Miami.

So maybe this is going to be the year when everybody gets the memo that Latino voters are not an actual thing, like they're not a voting bloc with shared interests and identities and political affiliations.

While vote the same this year, Mexican Americans in Arizona put the state within reach of the Democrats for the first time since the 90s. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Cuban-Americans and Venezuelans helped seal the deal with President Trump's victory in Florida. And then there's the generational split among Latinos tend to be more liberal than their parents. Nancy Reagan talked to a family like that, a mother and son from Miami, the Venezuelan and their split.

When I asked Marco and his mom, Ninotchka, how often they talked about politics, they were like, how?

It's a topic which is seem to see a lot.

We actually invited, they say, which can be tricky because Marco voted for Biden and Enoteca for Trump. They're part of that Venezuelan voting bloc in Florida that the press has been freaking out about, wondering why, oh, why would Latinos, as if we were one thing, vote for Trump? The family moved to Miami 20 years ago. They all still live together. Marco and Ninotchka actually work together at her accounting firm, one on a swimmer. OK, Yotsuba, get out Trump.

Marco tells his mom, because of Venezuela, I already knew you were going for Trump because Biden didn't come out hard against Maduro and Venezuela's socialist government.

Ninotchka also says Biden flirted her words with Cuba too much, and that was all a deal breaker for her. Too close to communism.

She can't even say Venezuela's former president's name. Hugo Chavez, she called him, is a no problem, which is and I'm not even exaggerating. He who must not be named like Voldemort.

Ninotchka really wants you to know, though, that she didn't vote for Trump. She voted for the Republican Party. She doesn't like him, at least not a lot.

She thinks he's really rude about immigrants, which she thinks is hypocritical, given that his wife is an immigrant. She thinks he's arrogant.

She also told me she hated the way he treats reporters, though I'm aware she said this to a reporter. I asked Marco how it made him feel that his mom voted for Trump.

He squirmed. He moved his hands a lot, avoided eye contact public.

Oh, yeah. Grew and grew. And on Israel, menthol. And it's a mess.

He says it's a mental and emotional mess. I feel strange.

I don't want to say betrayed tug of war.

She got some he they've been he's like, damn, I know other friends.

Another parent who also came here because of politics, also from Venezuela, and they went for Biden. And so it makes me think, what did these other parents find out that made them make a different decision, one that's more like mine.

He said his mom's vote made him feel a little ashamed of the no child does not even get a little upset about this.

She's like socialism, honey. He didn't live through it all the time.

When American Woofy when I was a kid, he got three. Ganassi, they're not happy. Agreed that they will be Sallie's. The name, she says, it's like you have a scar and it doesn't get erased and it still hurts and it won't close up.

How have you. How are you going to understand if you haven't lived it?

She tells me. How is he going to get it if he hasn't lived it either?

She points out, Marco, but those of us who have lived it always feel it here, she says, and she points at her heart and here and she points at her head.

Asked her if she thought the people who are scared about Trump, who think he may be the start of a regime itself like fascism, if she thought they were wrong, she said no. She said she could see it.

But that still seemed so far away and unreal compared to the socialism she did live through. One was a possibility.

The other was already a reality. And then just as we were wrapping up the interview, she said, you know, we got to just wait calmly for results and honestly for the good of the country. Maybe Biden should win. Trump makes people so angry.

This surprised me. She had been so clear about not wanting Biden, but when she unpacked it a little more, I understood.

She doesn't want unrest that she knows very well, she knows how that story ends. Nottie Raman is one of the producers. Six, Massachusetts is one of our producers, Chanko, so some talking head types on CNN recently discussing the stakes of this year's presidential election and how both Democrats and Republicans see it as existential. That's where they used existential, like the very existence of a democracy. Even our planet hangs in the balance. Which, you know, they can seem kind of abstract.

And these past few weeks, as we approach the Election Day, John, and somebody very close to him have been dealing with very immediate and a real world existential questions.

Yershon, about two weeks before the election, my stepfather, Ed, was admitted to Cape Cod Hospital. He was rushed there in an ambulance with extreme shortness of breath like he was suffocating, turned out to be lung cancer, a tumor almost the size of a golf ball that caused all this fluid to build up in his left lung.

Plus a precarious blood clot on the same lung. I raced up there from New York before even knowing the diagnosis at 90 and had already been battling stage four prostate cancer for a couple of years. So there's been this ambient sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When I got to the hospital, two nurses were settling him into the room where he'd spend the next four days. One of them asked him a whole battery of standard intake questions. History of smoking? Yes. Do you drink caffeine? Yes. And then she said, do you feel threatened by anyone at home or just in your life? Ed paused, looked down and said, the president. I thought that was really funny and also telling even in this dire moment for him, Trump in the election still kept bobbing back up to the surface as a Democrat follows the news pretty closely back when he was merely contending with stage four prostate cancer.

He told me several times that he just wanted to live long enough to see what happens with the election. Is that zero existential dread beyond that? And at some point during his hospital stay, I realized this was almost certainly going to be its last presidential election, and I wondered if he might be experiencing it differently than the rest of us. So for a couple of my daily hospital visits, I brought my recorder along.

Oh, my God, I'll be glad to be the last. Well, are you kidding?

Why? It's such nonsensical things and people act like assholes, excuse the expression, I mean, you know, like being a Republican has turned into some kind of religion now and being a Democrat, too. And once again.

I have the best position in the House if Trump wins, I don't care if I die. And if Biden wins, OK, Trump's gone, do you think you'll make it to the election? Well, I'll be mighty pissed at these doctors if I don't at that point.

Again, this was more than a week before Election Day. The doctors still hadn't given him a prognosis about how long he might live. They did tell him that the blood clot could detach at any time and go to his brain or his heart and kill him. He was equally sanguine and philosophical about that, as he's been about the cancer. Told me the clot will either kill him or it won't. And if it doesn't, why should he worry? And if it does, he won't be able to worry.

He's so placid about his mortality that it doesn't leave a lot of room for me morosely wringing my hands about it when I'm with him. But now there's this kind of gradient from what he's probably still going to be alive for, to what he might be, to what he probably won't be. And he doesn't get to choose, of course. But I thought I'd ask him anyway.

How long do you want to be around for? Like, what are the things that you want to see still?

Well, let's say Biden will take over. Trump still will be a lame duck president after the election, but still be president. So three months, three months. You want to keep going at least two more. I'm not going to commit suicide. And, you know, I'm not going to say I'd like to be around three months. That's four months go by and people say, why are you still alive? That doesn't make any sense to me.

As long as a lot of acute pain, I don't mind a little inconvenience to stay alive. There might be a good show on once in a while, but there might be a good book to read. I mean, you know, I'm not the one that wants to leave just for the sake of living. I think it's an excellent time and the next two or three years to die. Why you're avoiding all sorts of huge problems. Yeah, we have global warming coming out big time.

The country is still going to be divided even if Biden wins and he's going to hell a hell of a tie, put it back together. But I think he might. But still, Europe is going totalitarian. This country is going more totalitarian, which is scary, so there's not much to look forward to, things I would like to see our answers to big questions is there intelligent life in this universe is done on Earth. And I would like to he went on to talk about this thing.

He read about possible evidence of life on Venus. As usual. He got excited talking about this stuff like a kid.

I think it's his curiosity that's kept him around this long, the same curiosity, not partisanship or spite or ghoulish vengefulness, but curiosity that's had him wanting to see how the election plays out, which I think is such a pure perspective to watch this whole yukky circus from, especially as he'd be totally forgiven for just changing the channel.

But.

Hi, John. Hi, Ed, how are you doing? Fair to Midland, fair to middling. Yeah, this call was early Friday morning, three days after Election Day. Ed was back home from the hospital with three new prescriptions, including a heavy duty blood thinner for the clot, which has actually been working. And while almost everyone else I knew was biting their nails, waiting for the electoral scoreboard to change.

Ed was not, in fact, on election night itself. He did change the channel, didn't even watch the returns come in.

No, I watched Hallmark movie, which, you know, is scripted. You can always tell the outcome five minutes a day.

That's like the opposite of this election, basically.

Yeah, like the opposite of a lot of things in life. Most things. What's more interesting than who wins is what happens now. Yeah, it'll be far more interesting. Will the Trump supporters try to look for another person like Trump? Well, they try to find a leader. How is Russia going to behave?

It almost sounds like the script at the end of an episode of a TV show where they give you the cliffhanger, like will the dynamic duo escape the clutches of, you know, find out?

Exactly. And I hope for their country's sake, not for mine, because I won't be living that long in the future. So I hope for the country safe that Biden wins.

I told there's this thing I've been trying to square, how he can be so at peace with his own mortality and yet so concerned for the fate of the country and really the world he's leaving behind. Those seem like opposites, I said. He said he didn't see the conflict. Of course he's concerned. Yes. He's not going to be around a lot longer, but we will. And he still cares about that. Chanko is one of the producers of our show, This Land Is Your Land, This land is my land from the.

The Gulf Stream waters. I'll tell you this. He was made for you and me. My program has produced today by Dana Chevis and Ben Calhoun, the people who put together today's show include Anna Baker, Susan Burton, Shinkolobwe Vita Kornfeld, Hilary Elkin's, No Guilt, Damien Graves, Michelle Harris, Chana Joffe, Walt, Andrea Lopez, Cruzeiro, Nikki McWhinney, Mr. Stone Nelson. Catherine Raimondo is a pilot. Nadia Raymond, Robyn Semien, Louis Sullivan, Christopher Satullo, Matt Tierney and Diane Wu, managing editor Sarah Abdurrahman.

Our senior editors, David Kestenbaum, our executive editor. Emmanual Barry, special thanks.

Today to Rose and Steve Johnson, the rural Utah Project. Kate Grotzinger, Diana Bustillos, Vera Cardenas, Harini Krishnan, Janani Ganesh, Ryan Fisher, Grant Vamo, Josh Mandel, Sinclair Wardo, Lisa Kaplan, Cindy Otis and Sophie Walton of the Mafia Group of anarchist Carl Vassilis Johnson.

Christopher Rhoads, Joe Surtain Medical Madeline Ma Stevens, Jennifer Jordan, Laura Yellow, Zoe Clark, Sarah Hulett, Ursula Gousse, Gerard Marsal and Taylor Armstrong. Our website, This American Life Dog, This American Life, is devoted to public radio stations by parks. The Public Radio Exchange spoke for this. American Life comes from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, family owned, operated and argued over since 1980.

Proud supporter of independent thought, whether that's online, over the air or in a can or bottle more at Sierra Nevada.

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You know, he does a really bad impression of a kitchen door that's been left open on a windy day. Here he is, Tory.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on IRA Glass back next week. I wonder if we'll have a president by then.

See you soon. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, I think I should just confess, I record these promos like the one you're hurting right now for the radio show. I record them a week in advance and I have no idea what's going to happen this week. As I record this, some very big things are still up in the air in this country.

As a result, I have no idea what we're going to put on the radio show. But, you know, if you heard our show, you know, we do. We're going to do more of that. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.