"The Summer I Turned Pretty" Summary
By Jenny Han
young adult | 276 pages | Published in 2009
Estimated read time: 4 min read
One Sentence Summary
Belly spends a summer at the beach house, navigating love and friendship with the Fisher boys.
Table of Contents
Introduction, brief synopsis, main characters, story points over chapters, main events, themes and insights, reader's takeaway.
"The Summer I Turned Pretty" by Jenny Han is a coming-of-age novel that follows the story of Isabel "Belly" Conklin as she spends another summer at Cousin's Beach. The novel explores themes of love, friendship, and self-discovery as Belly navigates the complexities of growing up and finding her place in the world.
The story is set in the idyllic beach town of Cousins Beach, where Belly has spent every summer of her life. The novel opens with Belly eagerly anticipating the start of another summer at the beach house, where she will reunite with her mother, brother, and her mother's best friend's two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. The Fisher boys have been part of Belly's summers since she was a young girl, and this summer promises to be different as she begins to see the brothers in a new light.
The majority of the story takes place at Cousins Beach, a picturesque coastal town with sandy beaches, quaint cottages, and a close-knit community. The beach serves as a backdrop for the characters' experiences and interactions, providing a sense of nostalgia and freedom that is unique to the summer setting.
The main characters in "The Summer I Turned Pretty" include:
| The story unfolds over a series of summers, each marked by significant events and shifts in the dynamics between the characters.
Throughout the summers at Cousins Beach, several significant events shape the characters' experiences and relationships:
"The Summer I Turned Pretty" delves into various themes and insights, including:
Readers of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" will be immersed in a nostalgic and heartfelt coming-of-age story, resonating with themes of love, friendship, and self-discovery. The novel captures the bittersweet nuances of growing up and the enduring impact of summer memories on shaping one's life. Jenny Han's "The Summer I Turned Pretty" offers a poignant portrayal of adolescence and the transformative power of summers spent by the sea. With its relatable characters and evocative setting, the novel invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of love, friendship, and the defining moments that shape their journey to adulthood. The Summer I Turned Pretty FAQWhat is 'the summer i turned pretty' about. The book follows the story of a girl named Belly who spends every summer at the beach house with her mother's best friend and her two sons. It's a story of love, friendship, and coming-of-age as Belly navigates her feelings for the two brothers and the complexities of growing up. Who is the author of 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'?The author of 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' is Jenny Han, a well-known young adult fiction writer. Is 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' part of a series?Yes, 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' is the first book in a trilogy. The series continues with 'It's Not Summer Without You' and 'We'll Always Have Summer.' What genre is 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'?'The Summer I Turned Pretty' falls into the young adult and contemporary romance genres. What age group is the book suitable for?The book is suitable for young adult readers, typically in the 12-18 age range, but can also be enjoyed by older readers who appreciate coming-of-age stories and romance. Books like The Summer I Turned Pretty A Prayer For Owen MeanyBy John Irving  A Tree Grows in BrooklynBy Betty Smith  The Heart is a Lonely HunterBy Carson McCullers  Of Human BondageBy W. Somerset Maugham The Summer I Turned Pretty 81 pages • 2 hours read A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement. Chapter Summaries & Analyses Chapters 1-11 Chapters 12-20 Chapters 21-30 Chapters 31-40 Chapters 41-46 Character Analysis Symbols & Motifs Important Quotes Essay Topics The Challenges of Growing UpBelly Conklin looks forward to the day she feels grown up because she thinks it will improve every aspect of her life. Throughout her 16th summer , Belly learns that as much as she wants to grow up and enter the adult world, challenges lie therein. To Belly, growing up means access to a world that has previously eluded her.  Related TitlesBy Jenny Han Always and Forever, Lara Jean  It's Not Summer Without You  P.S. I Still Love You  To All the Boys I've Loved Before  We'll Always Have Summer  Featured CollectionsAsian American & Pacific Islander... View Collection Daughters & Sons Mortality & Death Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love The Summer I Turned Pretty Character Analysis EssayCam, is a very smart guy who knows about his future and has plans for himself. Belly and Cam have a good relationship going on throughout the summer. The main character is Isabel (Belly) Conklin is very dramatic, determined, and caring throughout the whole novel. For example, she was very dramatic when she was jealous. She was jealous when her crush Conrad would always be interested in another girl. “Conrad has come to the boardwalk for her. He’d brought me because he hadn’t want to come alone… that was it. That was the whole reason. That was the whole reason. Related posts:
The Summer I Turned Pretty Study GuideJenny Han is a renowned American author best known for her young adult fiction. Born on September 3, 1980, in Richmond, Virginia, Han is of Korean descent. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from The New School in New York City. Han's breakthrough came with her "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" trilogy, which was later adapted into a popular Netflix film series. Her work is celebrated for its relatable characters and heartfelt storytelling. Historical and Literary Context of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" "The Summer I Turned Pretty," published in 2009, is the first book in Jenny Han's trilogy of the same name. The novel captures the transformative summer of 15-year-old Isabel "Belly" Conklin, who spends every summer at a beach house with her mother, brother, and family friends—the Fishers. It explores themes of growth, love, and the bittersweet transition from adolescence to adulthood. During the late 2000s, young adult literature was undergoing a significant surge in popularity, marked by the success of series like "Harry Potter," "Twilight," and "The Hunger Games." Against this backdrop, Han's novel stood out for its realistic portrayal of teenage emotions and relationships, eschewing fantasy elements for a more grounded, heartfelt narrative. The book resonated with readers for its authentic depiction of teenage life and its nuanced exploration of family dynamics and first loves. Han's skillful writing and the relatable experiences of her characters have made "The Summer I Turned Pretty" a beloved staple in young adult fiction, contributing to the genre's evolution toward more diverse and emotionally complex stories. Want to generate unlimited academic essays?About rephrasely, getting your wording just right. 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Advertisement Your End-of-Summer Politics Quiz Is HereBy Gail Collins Aug. 28, 2024  Well, people, with Labor Day on the horizon, we really find ourselves in the race-for-the-White-House homestretch. Naturally, I want to see if you’ve been paying attention: Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech got rave reviews from many quarters. However, Donald Trump posted multitudinous attacks on his Truth Social platform during her delivery. One was … A. “Too much about her happy Family.” B. “Too many ERRONEOUS historical references.” C. “Too many ‘Thank yous.’” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, got national attention a while back when he referred to the Republican ticket as … A. “Mediocre.” B. “Truly wretched.” C. “Weird.” JD Vance was in a hotel room with his 7-year-old son when Trump called to offer him the vice-presidential slot. When he picked up the phone, Vance told the boy … A. “Remember, this may be one of the most important days in Dad’s life — and I’m sharing it with you.” B. “Now at least we’ve got a possible topic for that essay you have to write about what you did during your summer vacation.” C. “Shut the hell up.” The Trump campaign thought making Vance the vice-presidential nominee would brighten up the ticket. Soon, observers were questioning whether he was going to be a problem. Offered the chance to do some damage repair, Trump said … A. “Hey, there have been worse vice presidents. Remember Elbridge Gerry?” B. “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact.” C. “His wife is pretty, and he had a best-selling childhood. What more do you want?” One of the many Vance stories causing a stir was the discovery that he’d referred to Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives.” After the comment became news, Vance … A. Apologized to American women who weren’t mothers. B. Apologized to the Republican Party, saying, “Gee, I’m really getting off on the wrong foot, aren’t I?” C. Apologized to cats. One Republican who had been talked about earlier as a possible vice-presidential nominee was the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem. But Noem’s star faded a bit when she published a book that included the story of how she … A. Voted for Barack Obama in 2008. B. Shot her dog Cricket dead in a gravel pit. C. Asked Trump if he’d like some diet tips. On occasion, Trump drops the names of fictional characters he seems to like. One of them is … A. Beowulf. B. Huck Finn. C. Hannibal Lecter. Trump told a national gathering of Black journalists that he’d been the “best president for the Black population” since … A. Abraham Lincoln. B. George Washington. C. Jefferson Davis. At that gathering, Trump also made waves when he claimed that Harris had only recently … A. Begun to dress well. B. Turned Black. C. Told anybody how to pronounce her name. Harris has been talking a lot about her plan to cut grocery prices. The part we don’t quite know yet is … A. Whether we should defer eggs for breakfast a while longer. B. Whether she’ll have a shopping cart installed in the White House as a symbol. Joe Biden was deeply reluctant to forgo another presidential term. But he came around … A. After mega-lobbying efforts by everyone from Obama to Nancy Pelosi. B. After reading a book on fun bike trips for the post-80 crowd. C. After realizing that as long as he was in office, he was never going to get any pet besides Jill’s cat. Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw his support to Trump, apparently in hopes of getting a top role in the next administration. Kennedy’s own candidacy had been stumbling since … A. He admitted he thought Covid was a bird species. B. He revealed a long list of health issues, including a dead worm he said ate part of his brain. C. He told Vance that he shouldn’t act “so small-town.” R.F.K. Jr. revealed that a decade ago, he was driving in upstate New York and saw a woman hit and kill a bear cub. Junior left the dead bear in Central Park because he thought that would be … A. A good lesson on highway safety. B. “Amusing.” C. A performance art piece about having a famous father. When pressure began to rise for Biden to pass on another term in office, Trump seemed to have mixed emotions. He did reject some criticism of his former rival, saying … A. Eighty-one was “not old.” B. “He’s not as bad as James Buchanan.” C. “We could have had one terrific debate.” Trump told a group of conservative Christians that if they elected him back to office … A. “You don’t have to vote again.” B. “We’ll make everything about sex illegal.” C. “I’ll build a cathedral-size chapel at Mar-a-Lago.” A few big Senate races could decide control of the chamber. In Montana, Republican Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, has an injured right arm he said was a result of … A. A combat wound. B. An accidental misfire when he dropped his revolver while visiting Glacier National Park. State Representative Don Wilson, a Republican member of the Colorado House of Representatives, apologized to his colleagues after … A. Calling Harris an Easterner. B. Leaving a loaded semiautomatic handgun in a Colorado Capitol restroom. C. Proposing the state motto, Nil sine numine, be changed to “something in English.” Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History EssaysSaint petersburg. Ewer and basin (lavabo set)Probably made at Chisinau Court Workshop Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729)Unknown Artist, Swiss, Austrian, or German, active Russia ca. 1703–4 Samuel Margas Jr. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) on Horseback, Attended by a PageAttributed to Georg Christoph Grooth Table snuffboxNiello scenes after a print entitled Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Jacques de Lajoüe , published in Paris 1736 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)Jean Antoine Houdon Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg Cup with cover and saucerTwo bottle coolersZacharias Deichman the Elder Catherine II The Great, Empress of RussiaJean-Baptiste Nini Coffee serviceJohan Henrik Blom Tureen with coverTureen with cover and standJacques-Nicolas Roettiers Possibly by Pierre-François-Mathis de Beaulieu (for Jean Georges) Pair of scallop-shell dishesSugar bowl (from a tea service)Workshop of David Roentgen Beaker and saucerDavid Roentgen and Company in Saint PetersburgJohann Friedrich Anthing Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant or secrétaire en cabinet)Attributed to Martin Carlin Pair of Flintlock Pistols of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796)Johan Adolph Grecke Gardner Manufactory Center tableImperial Armory, Tula (south of Moscow), Russia Female ShamanPair of vasesNikolai Stepanovich Vereshchagin Jugate busts of Czarevitch Paul and Maria Feodorovna of RussiaJames Tassie Wolfram Koeppe Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2003 The Birth of Saint Petersburg Russia, or “Muscovy” as it was often called, had rarely been considered a part of Europe before the reign of Czar Peter I (Piotr Alexeievich), known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). His supremacy marked the beginning of the country’s “Westernization,” whereby the political, economic, and cultural norms of the western European monarchies would become the basis for “civilizing” Russia. A radical transformation was needed to launch Russia into the modern world, a transformation later called the Petrine Revolution. The young czar, feeling oppressed by the medieval traditions and ecclesiastical patriarchy of seventeenth-century Moscow, wanted to Westernize Russia in a hurry, defying the sluggish pace of history. Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 days of rain and 74 days of snow. The army, under the command of Alexander Menshikov ( 1996.7 ), had conquered the region shortly before. To show his gratitude, the czar later appointed Menshikov the first governor-general of Saint Petersburg. The fortification of the territory kept the Swedish enemy at bay and secured for Russia permanent access to the Baltic Sea. The partially ice-free harbor would be crucial to further economic development. All buildings on the site were erected on wooden poles driven into the marshy, unstable ground. Stones were a rare commodity in Russia, and about as valuable as precious metals. The Dutch name “Piterburkh” (later changed to the German version, “Petersburg”) embodied the czar’s fascination with Holland and its small-scale urban architecture. He disliked patriarchal court ceremony and felt at ease in the bourgeois domestic life that he experienced during his travels throughout Europe on “the Great Embassy” (1697–98). However, the primary purpose of this voyage was to acquire firsthand knowledge of shipbuilding—his personal passion—and to learn about progressive techniques and Western ideas. The victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in June 1709 elevated Russia to the rank of a European power, no longer to be ignored. Peter triumphed: “Now with God’s help the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg has been laid.” By 1717, the city’s population of about 8,000 had tripled, and grew to around 40,000 by the time of Peter’s death in 1725. Saint Petersburg had become the commercial, industrial, administrative, and residential “metropolis” of Russia. By the 1790s, it had surpassed Moscow as the empire’s largest urban vicinity and was hailed as the “Venice of the North,” an allusion to the waterway system around the local “Grand Canal,” the Neva River. Peter the Great’s Successors The short reign of Peter’s second wife, Empress Catherine I (r. 1725–27), who depended on her long-time favorite Menshikov, saw the reinstatement of the luxurious habits of the former imperial household. The archaic and ostentatious court display in the Byzantine tradition that Peter had so despised was now to be restored under the pretext of glorifying his legacy. Enormous sums of money were lavished on foreign luxury items, demonstrating the court’s new international status and its observance of western European manners ( 68.141.133 ). During the reigns of Empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–40), niece of Peter I ( 1982.60.330a,b ), and her successor Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna, r. 1741–62; 1978.554.2 ), Peter’s daughter, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a Baroque extravaganza through the talents of architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771) and other Western and Russian artisans. Foreign powers began to recognize Russia’s importance and competed for closer diplomatic relations. Foreign immigrants increased much faster than the local population, as scholars, craftsmen, artisans, and specialists of all kinds flocked to the country, and especially to Saint Petersburg ( 65.47 ; 1982.60.172,.173 ; 1995.327 ). Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) In a coup d’état assisted by the five Orloff brothers ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ), Catherine II overthrew her husband, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762) and became empress. Catherine saw herself as the political heir of Peter the Great. A German-born princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who, after her marriage, became more Russian than any native, Catherine aimed at completing Peter’s legacy ( 52.189.11 ; 48.73.1 ). Having lived in isolation in the shadow of Elizabeth I since her marriage to the grand duke in 1745, the time had come to satisfy her thirst for life and her insatiable quest for culture and international recognition. An admirer of the Enlightenment and devoted aficionada of Voltaire’s writings, Catherine stimulated his cult in Russia ( 1972.61 ). In response, the French philosopher dedicated a poem to the czarina; her reply, dated October 15, 1763, initiated a correspondence that influenced the empress on many matters until Voltaire’s death in 1778. The hothouse cultural climate of Saint Petersburg during Catherine’s reign can be compared to the artistic and intellectual ferment in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century. Catherine’s desire to enhance her fame and her claim to the throne was immortalized by her own witty play on words in Latin: “Petro Primo / Catharina Secunda” (To Peter the First / from Catherine the Second). This she had inscribed on the vast lump of granite in the form of a wave supporting the Bronze Horseman on the banks of the Neva in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. This triple-lifesize equestrian figure of Peter the Great took the French sculptor Falconet twelve years to complete, until it was finally cast—after three attempts—in 1782. Catherine had military expansion plans for Russia and a cultural vision for its capital Saint Petersburg. Above all, she knew how to attract devoted supporters. Only nine days after the overthrow of her husband, Catherine wrote to Denis Diderot, offering to print his famous Encyclopédie , which had been banned in France. Catherine recognized the power of art to demonstrate political and social maturity. She acquired entire collections of painting ( Watteau , for example), sculpture, and objects. The empress avoided anything that could be called mediocre or small. With the help of sophisticated advisors, such as Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, her ambassador in Paris, Denis Diderot, Falconet, and the illustrious Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, the empress assembled the core of today’s State Hermitage Museum. Catherine favored luxury goods from all over Europe ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ; 17.190.1158 ). She commissioned Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood pottery as well as hundreds of pieces of ingeniously conceived furniture from the German manufactory of David Roentgen in Neuwied ( 48.73.1 ). Furthermore, she encouraged and supported Russian enterprises and craftsmen, like local silversmiths ( 47.51.1–.5 ; 1981.367.1,.2 ) and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory ( 1982.60.171 ; 1982.60.177,.178 ; 1982.60.175 ), as well as privately owned manufactories ( 1982.60.158 ). Catherine especially liked the sparkling decorative products of the Tula armory steel workshop ( 2002.115 ), genuine Russian art forms with a fairy-tale-like appearance, and in 1775 merged her large collection of Tula objects with the imperial crown jewels in a newly constructed gallery at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, r. 1796–1801) disliked his mother and her aesthetic sensibility ( 1998.13.1,.2 ). As grand duke, he had spent most of his time with his second wife Maria Feodorovna ( 1999.525 ) outside of Saint Petersburg, in Gatchina Palace and Pavlovsk Palace. These they transformed into the finest Neoclassical architectural gems in Europe ( 1976.155.110 ; 2002.115 ). Koeppe, Wolfram. “Saint Petersburg.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stpt/hd_stpt.htm (October 2003) Further ReadingCracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Koeppe, Wolfram, and Marina Nudel. "An Unsuspected Bust of Alexander Menshikov." Metropolitan Museum Journal 35 (2000), pp. 161–77. Shvidkovsky, Dmitri, and Alexander Orloff. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars . New York: Abbeville, 1995. 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Find anything you save across the site in your account Inside the Trump Plan for 2025 One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its founder, Russell Vought, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a leading candidate to be the White House chief of staff in a second term, was in attendance, chatting amiably with the guests. He is trim and bald, with glasses and a professorial beard. His group is a kind of ivory tower for far-right Republicans, issuing white papers with titles such as “The Great Replacement in Theory and Practice.” In 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that asked, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?” The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office. What unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an associated group called America First Legal, which styles itself as the A.C.L.U. of the MAGA movement; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America. All of them are expected to have high-ranking roles in the government if Trump is elected again. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative movement by far,” someone close to the organization told me. “They have thought deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more anti-establishment conservative movement.” C.P.I. was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former adman from South Carolina who spent eight years in the Senate before resigning to lead the Heritage Foundation. During that time, he was one of Washington’s most notorious partisan combatants. As a senator, he attacked his Republican colleagues for being insufficiently conservative, tanking their bills and raising money to unseat them in primaries. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, called him “an innovator in Republican-on-Republican violence.” With C.P.I., DeMint wanted to create a base of operations for insurgents like himself. “If you’re not getting criticized in Washington,” he once said, “you’re probably part of the problem.” Other conservative groups have defined Republican Presidencies: the Heritage Foundation staffed the Administration of Ronald Reagan, the American Enterprise Institute that of George W. Bush. But C.P.I. is categorically different from its peers. It’s not a think tank—it’s an incubator and an activist hub that funds other organizations, coördinates with conservative members of the House and Senate, and works as a counterweight to G.O.P. leadership. The effort to contest the 2020 election results and the protests of January 6, 2021, were both plotted at C.P.I.’s headquarters, at 300 Independence Avenue. “Until seven years ago, it didn’t exist, and no entity like it existed,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, told me. “It’s grown by leaps and bounds.” C.P.I. and its constellation of groups, most of which are nonprofits, raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022. The organization has bought up some fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around Washington, including multiple properties on the Hill. A mansion on twenty-two hundred acres in eastern Maryland hosts trainings for congressional staff and conservative activists. Four political-action committees have rented space in C.P.I.’s offices, and many more belonging to members of Congress pay to use C.P.I.’s facilities, such as studios for podcast recordings and TV hits. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hard-line anti-institutionalist Republican lawmakers, and the Steering Committee, a similar group in the Senate, headed by Lee, hold weekly meetings at C.P.I.’s headquarters. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the organization a “gathering site” that offered “regular contact” with the power brokers of the conservative movement. He told me, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.” At the time of the event at Mar-a-Lago, in the spring of 2022, right-wing political circles were in a state of charged anticipation. Trump had not yet announced his reëlection bid, but inflation was high, Joe Biden was unpopular, and pollsters were anticipating a Republican rout in the upcoming midterms. “The left tried to drag America further into a dark future of totalitarianism, chaotic elections, and cultural decay,” C.P.I.’s leaders wrote. Those in attendance knew that Trump would soon enter the race. The question was what, exactly, they might get out of it. Shortly after 6 P.M. , Trump strode onto the patio, wearing his customary dark suit and a blue tie, and launched into a stem-winder. “It was so fucking funny,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Almost nothing was related to the Center for Renewing America other than a reference to how good Russ was. He was riffing on whatever was on his mind.” Trump recounted a trip that he’d taken to Iraq as President, but he kept digressing to complain about a thirteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier that he’d commissioned. At one point, he turned to the culture wars but couldn’t remember the phrase “critical race theory.” Vought, standing nearby, had to prompt him. “He was burning down the house,” the person told me. “Everyone was loving it.” Still, one aspect of the speech caught the attention of C.P.I.’s executives. Ever since Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial, in 2020, he has threatened to purge the government of anyone he considered disloyal. His defenders are united in the belief that career bureaucrats foiled his first-term plans from inside the government. C.P.I., which has spent years placing conservative job seekers in congressional offices, is now vetting potential staffers for a second Trump term. One of its groups, the American Accountability Foundation, has been investigating the personal profiles and social-media posts of federal employees to determine who might lack fealty to Trump. “The key throughout the speech was that Trump complained about his personnel,” the attendee said. “He said he had these bad generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.” Six years earlier, on a Monday in late March, cars ferrying some of the country’s most influential conservatives, including the Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Tom Cotton, began arriving at the Washington offices of the law firm Jones Day. DeMint, then the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo, the vice-president of the Federalist Society, entered discreetly through a parking garage, as they’d been instructed. Newt Gingrich, who wanted the press to see him, insisted on using the firm’s front door. They were attending a private meeting with Trump, who was rapidly gaining in the Republican primary but remained anathema to much of the G.O.P. establishment. “People in the conservative movement suddenly realized that Trump could be the horse that they could ride to victory,” a former senior Heritage staffer told me. “He was being shepherded around the conservative policy world. DeMint was a part of that.”  Link copied As early as January, 2016, DeMint predicted that Trump would win the Republican nomination. It was an unpopular position among conservatives, many of whom felt more ideologically aligned with Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. In a conference room at Jones Day, Trump gave a brief speech and opened the floor to questions. Leo asked him whom he’d nominate for federal judgeships. Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart on the Supreme Court, had died the previous month. Trump replied, “Why don’t I put out a list publicly of people who could be the sort of people I would put on the Supreme Court?” DeMint immediately volunteered Heritage for the job of drafting it. The Heritage Foundation was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Edwin Feulner, a Republican operative with a doctorate in political science. Under his direction, the think tank became the country’s leading bastion of conservative policy, with an annual budget exceeding eighty million dollars. When DeMint took over, in 2013, traditionalists on the organization’s board were concerned that his rebellious style would diminish the group’s reputation for serious research. He confirmed their suspicions by hiring several of his Senate aides. The former Heritage staffer said, “There were cultural differences between existing leadership and the DeMint team.” But DeMint’s arrival reflected changes already under way at the organization. In 2010, as the Tea Party emerged as a force in conservative politics, the think tank launched an advocacy arm called Heritage Action, which issued scorecards evaluating legislators’ conservatism and deputized a network of local activists as “sentinels” to enforce a populist agenda. Vought, who’d previously worked as a staffer in House leadership, helped lead the operation. Under DeMint, the group became merciless in its attacks on rank-and-file Republican lawmakers. “Heritage Action was created to lobby the Hill, but they took it one step further,” James Wallner, a lecturer in political science at Clemson University, who worked with DeMint in the Senate and at Heritage, told me. “They had a grassroots army. They used tens of thousands of activists to target people.” After the meeting with Trump, in 2016, some of DeMint’s staff objected to the task of drawing up a list of potential judges, arguing that Heritage was overcommitting itself. This was typically the domain of the Federalist Society, which was putting forth its own list of judicial nominees. But DeMint, sensing an opportunity to maximize his clout with Trump, dismissed the concerns. That August, after Trump became the Party’s nominee, Heritage was enlisted to participate in the Presidential transition in the event of a Trump victory. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey at the time, was overseeing the effort and put Feulner, who was then the chair of Heritage’s board of trustees, in charge of domestic policy. Feulner later told the Times that Heritage saw a greater opportunity to influence policy under Trump than it had under Reagan. “No. 1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes,” Feulner said of Trump. “No. 2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed.” He added, “If he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.” Heritage was already primed. The year after DeMint took over, he had begun an initiative called the Project to Restore America, which worked to build up a reserve of reliably conservative personnel. The morning after Trump won, DeMint called a meeting in an auditorium at Heritage headquarters. Many staffers had been there all night watching the returns in a state of elation. “We were criticized by a lot of our friends in the movement for even going to meetings with Trump,” DeMint said, according to the Times . Then, quoting a line from the eighties TV show “The A-Team,” he added, “I love it when a plan comes together.” The following day, Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser, summoned Christie to his office on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, in New York. “We’ve decided to make a change,” Bannon told him. Mike Pence, the incoming Vice-President, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, were replacing him. Christie wrote in his 2019 memoir that thirty volumes of policy and staff plans collected in large binders over several months “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.” Christie’s firing set off a scramble to finish the job of staffing the new Administration and preparing a slate of agenda-setting policies before Trump was sworn in. Heritage now had an even more direct role to play. Pence was friendly with DeMint, and a former Sessions aide, who was appointed to lead the transition’s daily operations, was close with Ed Corrigan, a former executive director of the Senate Steering Committee who was then a vice-president at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage went on to fill hundreds of jobs throughout virtually every federal agency, and some of the President’s most prominent Cabinet officials—including Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education; Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy—had appeared on the foundation’s lists of recommendations. “DeMint told friends and colleagues that he was proudest of his work at Heritage in placing Heritage employees into the Administration,” a DeMint associate told me. “That was a big deal.” Still, Heritage’s board remained fiercely divided over DeMint. Mickey Edwards, a founding Heritage trustee, said at the time that DeMint had turned “a highly respected think tank” into “a partisan tool” for the Tea Party. Wallner, who joined Heritage as its research director in the summer of 2016, told me, “I walked into a civil war.” He recalled meeting a board member at a hotel bar near the White House who asked outright, “Are you on team DeMint?” Such critics had expected Trump to lose spectacularly in November, discrediting DeMint in the process. Before Trump’s Inauguration, DeMint requested a new contract, but the board refused. The following spring, DeMint and his closest advisers went to San Diego for the annual Heritage donor retreat. The night before their flight home, they learned that DeMint was being fired. Corrigan was there, along with Wallner; Wesley Denton, a former DeMint staffer; and Bret Bernhardt, DeMint’s ex-chief of staff. “We had put our heart and soul into this,” Wallner told me. “It was shocking.” According to a study by the Brookings Institution, there was more staff turnover in the first thirty-two months of Trump’s Presidency than there had been in the entire first terms of each of his five predecessors. Inside the White House, a former senior official told me, Trump was constantly enraged that his Cabinet wouldn’t break the law for him. He wanted the Department of Homeland Security to shoot migrants crossing the Rio Grande, the Defense Department to draw up plans to invade Mexico, and the Internal Revenue Service to audit his critics. Trump didn’t understand why the government couldn’t revoke the security clearances of former intelligence officials who criticized him on CNN. The official said that Trump “talked about firing large numbers of the federal workers,” to eliminate any further checks on his agenda. The tumult presented an opportunity for outsiders like DeMint. He and his associates had started brainstorming their next moves before their flight from San Diego touched down in Washington. “You don’t need a think tank,” Wallner recalled telling DeMint. Their collective expertise was in Congress, where Party leadership always seemed to have the advantage of better and more extensive staffing. What if they levelled the playing field by helping to recruit conservative personnel, and schooling them in how to be more effective activists? DeMint and his group could train a new class of staffers and place them within the system. Conservatives in Washington also needed somewhere to gather, share ideas, and strategize. From 2011 to 2015, a group of Republican House members, who would eventually form the Freedom Caucus, had regularly met in the kitchen of a Heritage executive. One night, his wife was hosting a work dinner, so the group relocated to a restaurant called Tortilla Coast, which became their new meeting spot. On occasion, when they tried to book space at the Capitol Hill Club, an exclusive Republican hangout in Washington, Party leadership made sure that their request was declined. “The thing that made Heritage so powerful were the coalitions they could build,” Wallner told me. “That was the stuff DeMint loved.” The sentiment on the plane, he went on, was “Let’s do this thing that DeMint loves to do, that’s so vital. It would be like a WeWork for conservatives.” On May 10, 2017, DeMint and the others filed incorporation papers for the Conservative Partnership Institute. Their lawyer, who was also representing them in severance negotiations with Heritage, was Cleta Mitchell, a movement mainstay in her sixties who was, as the person close to C.P.I. told me, “the attorney for pretty much any new conservative group that was starting in Washington.” She became C.P.I.’s secretary. The institute’s accountant was a close associate of Leonard Leo’s. It was a lean operation at first: seven employees and a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue above a liquor store and an Asian-fusion restaurant. At the end of its first year, the group’s total assets and liabilities were less than a million dollars. Then the White House called. The President had been accusing his personnel of deliberately undercutting him, but his top aides were, in fact, struggling to fill an increasing number of vacancies within the executive agencies. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment for C.P.I.,” the person close to the organization told me. “The White House needed staffing help. People who joined the Administration were either R.N.C. hacks who didn’t like Trump or they were Trump-campaign supporters who could barely get their pants on in the morning.” One day in June, 2018, Hill staffers working for conservative members of Congress received an e-mail: “Interested in a job at the White House?” C.P.I. was hosting a job fair, at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The director of the White House’s personnel office would be in attendance, along with other senior officials. C.P.I. had been conceived to help staff congressional offices, but it was scaling up. “They needed a national figure,” another former DeMint staffer told me. “Their brand is bigger with Trump.” A year later, Trump was impeached for what he called a “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump suggested that U.S. military aid to Ukraine might depend on Zelensky agreeing to investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. At the impeachment trial, two members of the Trump Administration, Alexander Vindman, of the National Security Council, and Marie Yovanovitch, the recently fired Ambassador to Ukraine, testified against the President. Senator Cruz, who was coördinating with the President’s legal team, ran an impeachment “war room” out of the basement of C.P.I.’s headquarters. Using C.P.I. equipment, he also recorded a podcast, called “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” which he taped after each day’s testimony, attacking the proceedings as a partisan sham. “Verdict” was downloaded more than a million times, making it one of the most popular political podcasts in the country. A few weeks after Trump was acquitted, on a party-line vote in the Senate, a C.P.I. executive named Rachel Bovard addressed an audience at the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative activists. They’d assembled for a board-of-governors luncheon at a Ritz-Carlton in California. “We work very closely . . . with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House,” Bovard said, in footage obtained by Documented, a Washington-based watchdog group. “Because we see what happens when we don’t vet these people. That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.? That’s how we got Marie Yovanovitch. All these people that led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” By then, conservative activists, including Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, were assembling lists of “bad people” in the government for Trump to fire or demote. Government officials on the lists were often identified as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump. But behavior that counted as anti-Trump could be little more than an instance of someone obeying the law or observing ordinary bureaucratic procedure. In one memo, in which a Trump loyalist argued against appointing a former U.S. Attorney who was up for a job at the Treasury Department, a list of infractions included an unwillingness to criminally investigate multiple women who had accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. In October, 2020, Trump issued an executive order that was largely overlooked in the midst of the pandemic and that fall’s election. Known as Schedule F, it stripped career civil servants of their job protections, making it much easier for the President to replace them with handpicked appointees. The following month, when Trump refused to accept his election loss, “there were people in the White House who operated under the assumption that they were not leaving,” a former aide said. One of them was John McEntee, a caustic thirty-year-old who’d once been Trump’s personal assistant and was now in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. (In 2018, John Kelly, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, had fired McEntee for failing a security clearance owing to a gambling habit, but Trump rehired him two years later.) Young staffers were scared that McEntee might find out if they started interviewing for other positions. “There was fear of retribution if it got back to him,” the former aide said. Other White House officials, such as Meadows, were clear-eyed about the election results but vowed to fight them anyway. Meadows discreetly told a few staffers that, when Trump’s term was over, they should join him at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “C.P.I. was his ticket to be that pressure point on Capitol Hill,” one of the staffers told me. “He wanted to be the guy who held Congress to the MAGA agenda.”  From the start, C.P.I. was involved in efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results. One Freedom Caucus member recalled, “Election Day was Tuesday, and we got back to the Capitol the following Monday. Tuesday, they’re meeting at C.P.I. and talking about how to get Trump sworn in on January 20th.” On November 9th, during the Senate Steering Committee’s regular meeting at C.P.I., Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer, gave a talk about challenging the election results. “My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies,” Senator Lee, of Utah, told Meadows in a text. “You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.” By the end of December, many Republicans, including Lee, had given up on Powell. She was citing rigged elections in Venezuela as evidence that the voting-machine company Dominion had tampered with ballots cast for Trump, but, despite frequent requests from Trump loyalists, she could never substantiate the claims. Hard-core partisans came up with a new plan: they wanted to disrupt the process by which the government would certify the election results, on January 6, 2021. Cleta Mitchell, the secretary of C.P.I. and a lawyer for Trump, was central in advancing this idea. She had gone into the 2020 race believing that Democrats would attempt to steal votes. “I was absolutely persuaded and believed very strongly that President Trump would be reëlected and that the left and the Democrats would do everything they could to unwind it,” she later said. Two days after the election, Mitchell wrote an e-mail to the legal academic John Eastman, encouraging him to craft a case that the Vice-President had the unilateral authority to throw out the election results in seven states, where the legislatures could then choose new slates of pro-Trump electors. Pence, who consulted his own legal experts, was unconvinced. But Eastman hardly needed to persuade Trump, who urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to pressure Pence into blocking the certification process. Eventually, Eastman would be indicted in Arizona and Georgia on conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering charges for his role in trying to overturn the election. (He pleaded not guilty.) Much of the effort to turn people out for the January 6th protest took place at C.P.I. “There were a series of conference calls,” the Freedom Caucus member told me. “Mark Meadows was on a lot of them. Trump was on more than one. The rally was a big thing that C.P.I. and Freedom Caucus members were involved in. The idea was that they were going to get everybody together on the Mall. That was all discussed at C.P.I.” (A C.P.I. spokesperson told me, “No idea what they’re talking about. C.P.I. had absolutely no involvement in these events.”) On the afternoon of January 2nd, Mitchell joined the President on an hour-long phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump told him to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he needed to win the state. Later that evening, members of the Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, the caucus’s chairman, were scheduled to meet at C.P.I. to strategize about how to get their constituents to show up on January 6th. “Meadows was originally going to participate in person, but they moved it to conference call just to cover a wider breadth of people that weren’t in town,” Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows’s aide, said in an interview with lawyers from the January 6th Committee. The President also dialled in. Even after the riot at the Capitol, Mitchell continued to contest the 2020 returns from her perch at C.P.I. For some of the more elaborate electoral challenges, such as audits of the results in Arizona and Georgia, which persisted after Biden had taken office, it was important to the organizers that the process seem legitimate and serious—and therefore independent of Trump. According to an investigation by Documented, C.P.I. used an accounting mechanism to hide the fact that the former President was funding part of the organization’s recount efforts. On July 26, 2021, Trump’s political-action committee, Save America, donated a million dollars to C.P.I. Two days later, a new nonprofit called the American Voting Rights Foundation, or A.V.R.F., was registered in Delaware; its direct controlling entity was another group tied to C.P.I. The same day, Mitchell sent an e-mail to Cyber Ninjas, a private company that a group of far-right state legislators in Arizona had recruited to conduct an audit of the Presidential results in Maricopa County. C.P.I. then paid a million dollars to A.V.R.F. According to the Guardian , it was the “only known donation that the group has ever received.” On July 29th, in an e-mail on which a C.P.I. executive was copied, Mitchell explained that A.V.R.F. was contributing a million dollars to the Arizona audit. This spring, I received some friendly but unencouraging advice from a person close to DeMint: I shouldn’t count on speaking with him or his advisers. They were highly suspicious of mainstream attention. DeMint is now more of a figurehead at C.P.I. than an active leader of the organization. Meadows, who joined C.P.I. a week after leaving the Trump White House, and now receives an annual salary of eight hundred thousand dollars from the organization, is primarily a fund-raiser. He was indicted last year for election interference. (He pleaded not guilty.) Being in legal trouble is often a badge of honor in Trump’s circles, but Meadows has fallen under suspicion from some of his old allies. ABC News reported last year that he had secretly spoken with federal prosecutors who were investigating the former President, a story that Meadows has since disputed. A recent Times Magazine article called him “the least trusted man in Washington.” The daily operations of C.P.I. are run by Corrigan, its president, and Denton, the group’s chief operating officer. Corrigan declined to speak with me, but Denton was eventually willing to chat. One morning in May, we met in a coffee shop in the basement of a Senate office building. He is genial and plainspoken, with a youthful air and a beard that hangs thickly off his chin. During DeMint’s eight years in the Senate, Denton served as his director of communications, and they moved to Heritage together, in 2013. With the exception of a brief stint in the Trump Administration, where Denton worked at the Office of Management and Budget with Vought, he has been at C.P.I. since its creation. “There’s nothing complicated about what we do,” he told me. “We train staff and place staff. That’s it. There are some outgrowths of that, in terms of supporting new groups. But, basically, we’re here to support those who are in the fight.” In 2021, C.P.I.’s board made a fateful and, in retrospect, wise decision. High-ranking figures from the Trump Administration were leaving the government and needed a place to land during the Biden years. “It’s not hard to be a liberal in D.C.,” Denton told me. “It’s not the same for our side.” But C.P.I.’s founders were wary of creating just another version of the Heritage Foundation. “We had the opportunity to build a vast, huge bureaucratic organization when all our friends were coming out of the Trump Administration,” Denton said. “Instead, we helped them set up their own organizations.” The structure of these groups could seem both byzantine and incestuous to an outsider, but the idea, Denton told me, was “to insure mission alignment.” Stephen Miller formed America First Legal, a public-interest law group that has primarily targeted “woke corporations,” school districts, and the Biden Administration. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, which generated policy proposals as though the Trump Administration had never ended. Corrigan and Denton were on the board of Vought’s group; Vought, Corrigan, and Denton sat on the board of Miller’s group. As more organizations joined the fold, their boards increasingly overlapped, and the roster of ideologues and Trump loyalists grew. Gene Hamilton and Matthew Whitaker, key figures from the Trump D.O.J., worked at America First Legal. Ken Cuccinelli, from the Department of Homeland Security; Mark Paoletta, from the Office of Management and Budget; and Kash Patel, from the Department of Defense, became fellows at Vought’s group. By the end of 2021, C.P.I. had helped form eight new groups, each with a different yet complementary mission. The American Accountability Foundation focussed on attacking Biden’s nominees. The State Freedom Caucus Network helped state legislators create their own versions of the House Freedom Caucus in order to challenge their local Republican establishments. The Election Integrity Network, run by Mitchell, trained volunteers to monitor polling places and investigate state and local election officials. American Moment concentrated on cultivating the next generation of conservative staffers in Washington. C.P.I. connected the founders of these groups with its network of donors and, in some instances, helped support the organizations until they could raise money for themselves. As American Moment waited for the I.R.S. to formalize its nonprofit tax status, for example, C.P.I. served as a fiscal sponsor, allowing donors to earmark money for the new group by giving it to C.P.I. The organization also offered its partners access to an array of shared resources: discounted real estate, accounting services, legal representation. “This all had an in-kind value of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. C.P.I.’s accounting firm, called Compass Professional, was run by Corrigan’s brother; its law firm, Compass Legal, was headed by Scott Gast, a lawyer in the Trump White House. Aside from C.P.I., Compass Legal’s most lucrative client to date, according to F.E.C. filings, has been Trump himself, whose campaign and political-action committees have paid the firm four hundred thousand dollars in the past two years. Another major client was the National Rifle Association, which paid the firm more than three hundred thousand dollars in 2022. Compass Legal was established in March, 2021, two months after C.P.I.’s lead lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was forced to resign from her job as a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner. Her participation in Trump’s phone call to the Georgia secretary of state had caused too much controversy. She blamed her departure on a “massive pressure campaign” orchestrated by “leftist groups.” In a subsequent C.P.I. annual report, the group said that a large part of its mission was helping conservatives “survive the Leftist purge and ‘cancel-proof’ conservative organizations.” This was not simply the rhetoric of conservative victimhood. Andrew Kloster, a former employee of Compass Legal who is now Representative Matt Gaetz’s general counsel, described one of C.P.I.’s goals as “de-risking public service on the right.” For anyone who might run afoul of mainstream opinion, C.P.I. had created an alternative, fully self-sufficient ecosystem. One part of it was material: recording studios, direct-mail services, accounting and legal resources, salaried jobs and fellowships. The other element was cultural. C.P.I. was demonstrating to Trump allies that, if they took bold and possibly illegal action in service of the cause, they wouldn’t face financial ruin or pariah status in Washington. Over coffee at the Capitol, in May, Kloster, who is bald with a bushy beard, explained the story behind a legal-defense fund that he’d helped create, called Courage Under Fire. It supported people who’d been “targeted for their civil service in conservative Administrations, including those indicted for fighting the 2020 election,” he said. The fund has spent more than three million dollars to date, according to the Washington Post , with the money going toward legal costs incurred by John Eastman; Mike Roman, a former Trump-campaign operative; and Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser to Trump who has since been convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena related to the January 6th investigation. “We started with a lot of Trump advisers,” Kloster said. “It’s a large class.” Eastman, he added, was a prime example: “He has been targeted for legal advice he gave in the course of his duties consulting with former President Trump. He’s being charged with criminal fraud. That’s for the mob lawyer in ‘The Godfather’ trying to knowingly facilitate crimes, not for someone saying, ‘Here’s what I think the law is.’ ” Courage Under Fire was created by Personnel Policy Operations, a nonprofit in the C.P.I. network which, in 2022, spent more than a million dollars on lawyers for Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, according to NOTUS , an online news site. C.P.I. maintains that the groups it has launched are independent. “We don’t control them,” the C.P.I. spokesperson said. But Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director of Documented, pointed out that in 2022 nearly all the money spent by Personnel Policy Operations came from C.P.I., and that virtually all such spending went toward legal defense. He told me, “The most reasonable inference is that they were routing money from C.P.I. to Personnel Policy Operations to pay for Meadows’s and Clark’s legal fees.” (The C.P.I. spokesperson said, “Liberal groups like these have made wild claims against the right for years that go nowhere. C.P.I. is in compliance with all laws for nonprofits.”) Tim Dunn, a billionaire Texas oilman and a major donor to C.P.I., has been tapped specifically to fund the group’s legal-defense efforts. When Scott Perry, of Pennsylvania, the former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, faced legal scrutiny for his involvement in January 6th—he had organized an attempt to contest the results in his state and, after ignoring a congressional subpoena, was ordered by a judge to turn over his cell phone to prosecutors—Meadows arranged to pay his legal fees by asking Dunn for the money, someone with knowledge of the arrangement told me. (Perry’s campaign and C.P.I. both denied this account. “This is completely false,” the C.P.I. spokesperson said. Dunn could not be reached for comment.) C.P.I.’s headquarters is a three-story town house with a blue door, on a leafy block near the Capitol. Inside, a warren of offices gives way to a series of parlorlike spaces with high ceilings. There are luminous conference rooms upstairs, each named for a prominent donor. Last summer, I visited 300 Independence Avenue to interview Vought. At the time, we were discussing his role in creating a congressional subcommittee to advance a dominant Republican narrative in the House: that Democrats had weaponized the federal government against conservatives. It was a kind of unified theory of the deep state, which held that the Justice Department and the U.S. intelligence community had colluded to silence right-wing voices. It had the added utility of casting Trump as the ultimate martyr of the conservative movement. Each of his legal travails, Vought said, proved that Democrats were shamelessly engaged in “lawfare.” These days, Vought has appeared in the news as a key architect of a second-Trump-term agenda, alongside some of the other usual suspects: Stephen Miller, Gene Hamilton, Jeffrey Clark, and Kash Patel. Trump has been explicit about his intention to exact revenge on political enemies. “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” he told a crowd of supporters in March of last year. “And, for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Three months later, after his arraignment in Miami for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing a federal investigation, he added, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt President in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”  Vought and Clark, meanwhile, have been advancing a formal rationale to break the long-standing expectation that the D.O.J. should operate independently of the President. The norm has been in place since Watergate, but they have argued that Trump could run the department like any other executive agency. Clark published his case on the Center for Renewing America’s Web site under the title “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” In early 2021, while Trump was fighting the results of the election, he wanted to make Clark the Attorney General, but the entire senior leadership of the department threatened to resign en masse. Now, if Clark gets a top job at the D.O.J., he is expected to use the position to try to remake the department as an instrument of the White House. Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times . The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military. Many of the other agenda items related to immigration that were delayed, blocked, or never fully realized during the chaos of the first term would be reinstated to more extreme effect in a second: an expanded ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries, a revocation of visas for students engaged in certain forms of campus protests, an end to birthright citizenship. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error,” Miller told the Times last November. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” The overarching scheme for the second Trump term, called Project 2025, follows an established Washington tradition. It is being organized by the Heritage Foundation and has taken the form of a nine-hundred-page policy tract. But the scale of this undertaking, which is costing more than twenty million dollars, is bigger than anything Heritage has previously attempted. The organization has hired the technology company Oracle to build a secure database to house the personnel files of some twenty thousand potential Administration staffers. Kevin Roberts, the current president of Heritage, has also enlisted the participation of more than a hundred conservative groups, as well as top figures from C.P.I.: Vought, Corrigan, Miller, and Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment. “These were the key nodes,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Roberts was paying Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and America First Legal to do parts of the project.” (Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.) The fact that Heritage was helping to staff a full-fledged MAGA operation, the person went on, was a reflection of C.P.I.’s mounting influence. Two years ago, Roberts addressed the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering of far-right activists, which was hosted by an organization that is now associated with C.P.I. “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours,” he said. Last year, Corrigan, who is on the steering committee of Project 2025, was invited to speak at Heritage’s fiftieth-anniversary conference. “The leadership at Heritage has brought back the C.P.I. folks even though they got pushed out six years before,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Kevin is being realistic. He needs to make peace with these guys.” My source, who has been involved in Project 2025, outlined a few immediate actions that Trump would take if he won. Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., would be fired “right away,” he told me. Even though Trump nominated Wray to the position, the far right has blamed Wray for the agency’s role in arresting people involved in the insurrection. (As Vought told me, “Look at the F.B.I., look at the deep state. We have political prisoners in this country, regardless of what you think about January 6th.”) The other hope in getting rid of Wray is that, without him, the Administration could use the agency to target its political opponents. The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?” Trump’s former economic advisers Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro want Trump to impose tariffs of as much as ten per cent on foreign imports. Economists across the political spectrum have predicted that such a policy—which could trigger an international trade war, dramatically boosting inflation—would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. “Lighthizer and Navarro are fucking clowns,” the person told me. Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Something under discussion is who they could actually appoint without Senate confirmation,” the person added. Schedule F, the executive order from October, 2020, that enabled the purge of career civil servants, was rescinded by the Biden Administration, but it would be reinstated by Trump. Presidents typically take their most decisive action in the first hundred days. The plan for Trump, I was told, was to set everything in motion “within hours of taking office.” This was what Trump had apparently meant when he told Sean Hannity, earlier this year, that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “except for Day One.” The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the most radical aspects of Project 2025. There are no benefits—only political liabilities—to endorsing so many specifics. Trump’s supporters already know what he stands for, in a general sense. And there is the more delicate matter of the former President’s ego. “He wouldn’t want to be seen as taking guidance from any other human being,” the former senior White House official told me. “He doesn’t like to be seen as someone who doesn’t know everything already.” On July 5th, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He said that he wished them luck. His fortunes, though, were rising. The Presidential race was now his to lose. By the spring, he was steadily leading in national polls, with a larger edge in key battleground states. The Biden campaign had proposed two debates, with a format designed to control Trump’s pugilistic impulses: no studio audience and the microphones silenced after each answer, to prohibit interruptions. But during the first debate, on June 27th, Biden faltered. He stood rigidly at the podium, with a slack, vacant expression. His voice was weak and wavering, and he repeatedly trailed off mid-thought. The disastrous performance has since led an increasing number of Democrats to call for him to withdraw from the race. The following week, Trump was on the golf course with his son Barron and was caught on video summarizing the current electoral landscape. “I kicked that old broken-down pile of crap,” he said of Biden. “That means we have Kamala,” he went on. “I think she’s going to be better. She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic.” In the first year of Biden’s Presidency, C.P.I. raised forty-five million dollars, more money than it had received in the previous four years combined. A single donor was responsible for twenty-five million dollars of that year’s haul: Mike Rydin, a seventy-five-year-old widower from Houston, who in 2021 made a fortune from the sale of his company, which developed software for the construction industry. Until then, he was a small-time Republican donor and a relative unknown in national political circles; in 2019, he contributed only about seven thousand dollars to the Trump campaign, according to the Daily Beast. But Rydin told me that he considered C.P.I.’s founder “the most honest man in America.” While DeMint was in the Senate, he started a political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise money for right-wing candidates who challenged Republican incumbents in Party primaries. “That was a cardinal sin,” the DeMint staffer told me. “He primaried his colleagues.” Some of the candidates supported by the PAC —Lee, in Utah; Rand Paul, in Kentucky; and Marco Rubio, in Florida—defeated fellow-Republicans backed by Senate leadership, then won their general elections. But, in other races, DeMint’s intervention backfired. In Delaware, he championed the candidacy of Christine O’Donnell, a conservative activist whose campaign imploded after footage surfaced of her saying that she’d “dabbled into witchcraft.” DeMint was unbothered. “I’d rather have thirty Marco Rubios in the Senate than sixty Arlen Specters,” he once said, referring to the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, who eventually switched parties. DeMint’s crusade reminded Rydin of his own career—the years of financial struggles, the uncertainties, the skeptics. “I knew what it was like to be alone,” he said. “It’s tough to be alone, to fight battles alone.” When a representative from the Senate Conservatives Fund reached out to him, in 2009, Rydin agreed to donate a thousand dollars. “That was, like, the most money I’d ever donated to anything,” Rydin said. Afterward, he told me, “someone calls me and says, ‘Senator DeMint wants to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘A senator? Really?’ ” Rydin is polite and unprepossessing, almost droll. In our conversations, he was guarded but firm in expressing his commitment to ending illegal immigration, cutting government spending, and getting foreign countries to deal with their own problems. Rydin admitted that when Trump, as President, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico “it scared the hell out of me.” But, he added, “everything Trump did turned out wonderfully. I’m not going to second-guess him anymore.” In the end, Rydin’s attraction to extreme figures seemed more personal than ideological. In 2015, he met Mark Meadows after Meadows, then a congressman from North Carolina, attempted to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, a radical act for which Meadows was later described as “a legislative terrorist.” “He was absolutely terrified to do that,” Rydin told me. “He got no support whatsoever.” Shortly after DeMint started C.P.I., in 2017, he and a colleague flew to Houston to meet with Rydin and other potential donors. Rydin had donated to Heritage while DeMint was there but stopped after his departure. (He has since resumed his contributions.) “It wouldn’t have bothered me if I never contributed to them again,” he said, “because they were firing Jim.” Now DeMint told him about his plans to create a conservative community in Washington, a place where members of Congress could confer before and after votes. “I’m on board,” Rydin told him. “You don’t have to say anything else.”  Rydin was ready to donate to C.P.I., but his wife, who avoided politics, was uncomfortable with him giving more than twenty-five thousand dollars. “To get her to twenty-five thousand dollars was a big deal,” he said. By the time she died, of cancer, in 2020, he’d increased his donation to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The next year, “I sold my company and had a lot of money,” he told me. C.P.I. used part of Rydin’s twenty-five-million-dollar donation to buy, for seven million dollars, a lodge with eleven bedrooms on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which it named Camp Rydin. The property has a shooting range and a horse stable. (“It’s rustic but luxurious,” the person close to C.P.I. told me.) To date, C.P.I. has held some two dozen trainings there for congressional staff and conservative activists, according to travel-disclosure forms filed with the government. Rydin has also donated to many of the groups in the C.P.I. network, including the Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and the American Accountability Foundation. In July, America First Legal sent out a preëlection fund-raising pitch: through August 15th, all donations up to two million dollars would be matched by “Houstonian patriot and generous AFL supporter Mike Rydin.” As a nonprofit, C.P.I. is forbidden to engage in partisan spending or certain kinds of lobbying. Its network of associated organizations, however, has allowed it to do both of those things through a legal back door. America First Legal, like C.P.I., is a nonprofit. But it has a related entity called Citizens for Sanity, which can spend money on political advertising with minimal restrictions. In the last six months of 2022, Citizens for Sanity spent more than ninety million dollars on ads, including one that ran during the World Series. It laid the blame for crime, high inflation, and low wages on illegal immigration and warned viewers that Biden was leading the country toward “World War Three.” Other ads have decried “the woke left’s war on girls’ sports” and the “woke war on our children.” The group’s spending eclipsed that of both C.P.I. (which spent twenty-three million dollars in 2022) and America First Legal (which spent thirty-four million dollars). It’s impossible to know who donated the money, but the address listed on the tax documents for Citizens for Sanity is 300 Independence Avenue. C.P.I.’s pitch to donors is also predicated on its close relationships with legislators in Washington. One member of the Freedom Caucus told me that House lawmakers were directly involved in C.P.I.’s fund-raising efforts. “When they made donor phone calls, they talked about how C.P.I. was the home of the Freedom Caucus,” the member told me. “The idea was ‘You should give to us because we support the real conservatives.’ ” When House members are in Washington to take votes, C.P.I. often arranges donor events at 300 Independence Avenue. “The presence of the members was to help raise money, and they were requested to mingle with the donors,” the lawmaker said. C.P.I.’s association with the Freedom Caucus raises questions about whether the organization can credibly claim to be a nonprofit that steers clear of actual lobbying. In January of 2023, members of the Freedom Caucus met at C.P.I.’s headquarters to strategize about their attempt to block Kevin McCarthy from becoming the House Speaker. Meadows joined and advised them on how to proceed; he was regarded as someone with expertise, having tried to oust Boehner in 2015. “It’s pretty extraordinary that Meadows was sitting there talking about how to deny McCarthy the Speakership and how to negotiate concessions,” the member told me. C.P.I. also exerts an unspoken power over lawmakers because of its ties to the House Freedom Fund, the caucus’s political-action committee, which is also registered at 300 Independence Avenue. Since 2021, Rydin no longer appears to be C.P.I.’s biggest donor. His foundation gave the group $1.5 million in 2022, but, according to C.P.I.’s tax filings, an unnamed donor contributed $15.5 million that year. Among C.P.I.’s most recent donors are the Servant Foundation, a fund backed by David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby; Donors Trust, a fund associated with Leonard Leo and the Koch family; the Bradley Impact Fund, an offshoot of a Wisconsin-based philanthropy where Cleta Mitchell serves as a board secretary; and the Ohio food-packing magnate Dave Frecka and his wife, Brenda, who have a conference room named after them at 300 Independence Avenue. “The previous dark-money political-influence operations tended to be run by more old-school billionaire, polluter, right-wing interests,” Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told me. “C.P.I. represents the MAGA move into this space.” On a bright, warm day in May, I visited Saurabh Sharma, the twenty-six-year-old head of American Moment, which describes its mission as “identifying, educating, and credentialing” a new generation of conservative staffers. Dressed in a blazer and tie, with round glasses and brown bit loafers, he greeted me in front of a small door on Pennsylvania Avenue that was wedged between a Sweetgreen and a Dos Toros. A narrow staircase led to a small office suite that the group had rented from C.P.I. Between February, 2022, and March, 2023, C.P.I. bought seven buildings and a parking lot along this stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. It made the purchases through a web of more than a dozen limited-liability companies, taking out at least twenty-five million dollars in mortgages. What helps the group cover the monthly payments is the rent that it charges its network of affiliated nonprofits. Behind the buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, C.P.I. plans to close off the back alley and create a nine-thousand-square-foot “campus” called Patriots’ Row. It already has a property next to the Senate; by expanding its footprint closer to the House, it hopes to insure that staffers from both chambers, as well as the lawmakers themselves, have places to congregate within walking distance of their daily business. Sharma led me past a counter with a tap for cold brew and into a room filled with chairs and a lectern. He is originally from Texas, where he was the youngest-ever chairman of the state’s Young Conservatives association, and carries himself with the aplomb of someone twice his age. “No one else is as obsessed with finding young people and making them into extremely influential political actors within bureaucratic government life,” he told me. “No one cares as much about doing that as I do.” Four years ago, Sharma stayed up late one night reading an essay by Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, who was then a venture capitalist and a best-selling author. The piece, titled “End the Globalization Gravy Train,” was a statement of principles for a branch of the conservative movement ascendant in the Trump era and known as the New Right: economic nationalism, foreign-policy isolationism, hostility to immigration. Sharma was struck by a portion of the essay in which Vance argued that personnel at every level of government in Washington were not up to the task of responding to the demands of the moment. It was something that Sharma had heard gripes about before, during a summer internship in Washington. For too long, he said on a recent podcast, government offices were staffed by “twenty-three-year-old shitheads” sent to D.C. by their parents to keep them “as far away from the family business as humanly possible.” He put it to me more soberly: “The personnel pipeline needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Who are the fifty twenty-year-olds we should be looking at? There needs to be a white-glove process by which they’re brought into the fold.” In the winter of 2021, C.P.I. convened a meeting of its top donors in the ballroom of a Miami hotel. Sharma pitched the donors on his new venture, alongside Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. “It was a very risky thing for them to do,” Sharma told me of C.P.I. “Most groups in Washington don’t want to share their donors. It shows a great deal of confidence on the part of C.P.I.” At the gathering, Sharma met Rydin, who immediately took to him. Later on, while Sharma was speaking to another donor, Rydin approached the pair. “Isn’t this guy so impressive?” Rydin said to the donor, pointing to Sharma. “Well, are you going to help him?” Sharma considers C.P.I. a “fraternity” devoted to, in his telling, creating a new and lasting culture in Washington. “The right and its people are almost like sedimentary rock,” he said. “It’s like the Grand Canyon. You can see the layers in it. Who the President is in any given year defines what kind of people choose to get involved in center-right politics.” He ran through some history, starting with Barry Goldwater, in the nineteen-sixties, and ending with Trump. “President Trump getting elected brought in an entirely new generation of people,” he said. The problem was that most Republicans in Washington had initially detested the former President. As a result, Sharma said, “no one was interested in elevating a young kid that came to them and said, ‘I’d really like to get involved in politics because President Trump was right. We got lied into Iraq. We should shut down the border. And we’re getting sold out by China when it comes to trade.’ ” American Moment, he went on, was correcting the “injustice” of the fact that, for the first few years of Trump’s term, the views of such young people were “artificially suppressed” in Washington. “The way that the Trump legacy will be immortal, the way that Trump himself will be immortal, is if there’s a corresponding generation of people that are drawn to politics based on his vision,” Sharma said. Some conservative ideologues tend to see Trump as a wild but ultimately necessary means to an end. In Sharma’s view, Trump is the “alpha and the omega of the conservative movement.” He told me, “The only reason these opportunities exist is because Trump ran and won. The only reason these opportunities exist today is because Trump hasn’t left the scene.” Sharma had to leave to host a book party at C.P.I. headquarters, which was across the street, and we strolled over together. While we waited at a crosswalk, a young congressional staffer stopped to shake Sharma’s hand. A few other people were making their way to C.P.I.’s town house. At the party, there was a full bar and pulled-pork sandwiches. In a few days, American Moment would be hosting a Hawaiian-themed bash called the Lawless Lawfare Luau, where attendees would wear leis. “I don’t know a D.C. without C.P.I.,” Sharma told me. “But those who were around before say it was a wasteland.” ♦ New Yorker FavoritesAn Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology . Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon . The young stowaways thrown overboard at sea . As he rose in politics, Robert Moses discovered that decisions about New York City’s future would not be based on democracy . The Muslim tamale king of the Old West . Fiction by Jamaica Kincaid: “ Girl .” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .  Shooter Files by f.d. walker Street Photography Tips, Interaction, Travel, Guides Dec 05 2016 7 First Impressions of Saint-Petersburg, Russia (From a Street Photography Perspective) One of the most common questions I get is “what is my favorite city for street photography?” I find positives and things I like and miss in every city I go to. Cities are different and it’s impossible for me to name one best city. But I do have a few that stick out in my memory and Saint-Petersburg is one of them. It’s also the city that causes many people the biggest surprise when I mention it. While they know all about cities like Istanbul, London or Havana, they usually ask me to explain “Why Saint-Petersburg?”  Well, there’s just something magical about Saint-Petersburg. The canals, pastel colors, incredible architecture, bridges, islands, hundreds of parks, and more give it this atmosphere that has to be experienced. The life and people are full of character too, but it’s a diverse mix of character. For more details behind some of what I love about this city, here are my first impressions of Saint-Petersburg, from a personal street photographer perspective… 7 First Impressions of Saint-Petersburg (From a Street Photography Perspective)1. canals are beautiful. Saint-Petersburg has been nicknamed the “Venice of the North” due to its many canals running throughout the city. With around 100 waterways and over 800 bridges, it’s as much a part of the city as anything.  There are only a few cities in the world where water is as much a part of the city as here. It gives it a calming atmosphere walking along the canals, while providing a place for street photography scenes you wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. Some of the city islands provide parks overlooking the water and the bridges are something the city is really known for. A city having some type of body of water has always been important to me for many reasons, and it’s a big reason I love this city so much.  2. So is the architectureAnother thing that stands out in Saint-Petersburg is its variety of impressive architecture. The colors and range of styles really make for a magical atmosphere when combined with the canals. While you can find Soviet style too, it’s the mix of other styles that really makes the city stand out in Russia. For Baroque-Style, you have the grand Winter Palace, now the home of the Hermitage Museum. For Art Nouveau/Style Moderne, you have the famous Singer House in the middle of Nevsky Prospekt. For Neo-Gothic, you have the pink Chesme Church. And of course, for the Stalinist and Soviet Architecture, you have places like the House of Soviets and the 1920s Red Banner Textile Factory.  Saint-Petersburg is also home to my favorite church, The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. The style is more medieval Russian, resembling Moscow’s famous St. Basil’s Cathedral. The Church is covered with over 7500 square meters of mosaics, arguably more than other church in the world. It can look like a painting against the sky’s backdrop. For someone unfamiliar with Saint-Petersburg, the architecture might be your most impressive surprise. And for photography, it can work beautifully for backgrounds.  3. Very walkable for a large cityAt over 5 million people, Saint-Petersburg is actually the 4th largest city in Europe by population. When it comes to walkability, though, it’s very good for a city its size. While Moscow is double the population, it’s nowhere near as walkable of city as Saint-Petersburg.  Interest doesn’t feel as spread out here so you can walk from place to place without going long distances between photography opportunities. Transportation is solid here too with the metro system, but won’t be needed as often as many large cities. 4. Parks everywhereWith over 200 parks and gardens, St. Petersburg is the greenest of Russia’s major cities. It’s one of my favorite parts about the city too, especially in the summer. Wherever you are, there’s a park nearby. Many of them are large, open and full of life too. After the canals, bridges and architecture, it’s what I think of next when I think about Saint-Petersburg. They can make for great spots for street photography too.  Summer Garden is the oldest park in the city, created in 1704 for Peter the Great and containing Russia’s oldest collection of park sculptures. Catherine Garden gets plenty of activity due to its location, right in the center of Nevsky Prospekt. Alexander Garden is another beautiful park, located by the Hermitage, but my favorite would have to be the Field of Mars, which used to be the setting for military parades and drills. Most of these parks I walked through daily for street photo opportunities, and for a relaxing break.  5. White Nights is an amazing time to be hereThe summer is definitely the best time to be in Saint-Petersburg. Due to its location up north, summer light can last almost 24 hours a day. While I was there, it didn’t get dark until midnight, with the sun coming out again at 3am. Because of this, the city has the White Nights Festival during its longest days (a few weeks during June to July).  The city fills with life everywhere during this time, with people outside walking the streets, canals and bridges or enjoying the sun at the many parks. And this activity lasts as long as the sun does so if you wanted to, you could shoot all day and night here without getting bored. It’s a different city during the summer and makes it one of the most enjoyable cities for photography I’ve been to.  6. Don’t stand on the bridge next to drunk people fightingThis is a very personal impression as I doubt the odds are high it will happen to others, but I might as well share it for your entertainment :) White Nights goes for weeks, but has a specific Saturday where the city really celebrates. Since universities and schools end for the year at this time, it’s also become tradition for young people to celebrate during this event too, especially graduates. All this celebrating in the streets from morning to night mean lots of drinking.  I was crossing one of the many bridges and saw a large group of university students dressed fancy while celebrating with champagne. I stopped to take a few photos, when all of a sudden a fight between a group of young women and an older man broke out. At first it was arguing, but then it started turning to drunk pushing. Unfortunately, while I was looking away taking a photo of some others, the group started pushing their way towards me. As soon as I turned, a cluster of them was right up on me pushing, and I got taken over the bridge with three of them. Into the river. Camera, phone, and all.  Surprisingly, my camera dried out and started working a couple of days later, but my phone never recovered. So always be aware of your surroundings, especially when they’re drunk ;) 7. Culture Capital. Very european side of Russia (in the center)For anyone that’s never been to Russia, Saint-Petersburg might feel much different than expected. The people who are most surprised Saint-Petersburg is one of my favorite cities in the world are usually the ones that picture a dark Soviet version of Russia. Personally, I really enjoy the more “Russian” parts of Russia due to their character, but Saint-Petersburg has its own special magic. It’s filled with culture, art, museums, operas, plays, and everything that would rival anything Western Europe could throw at it. It’s been called a “window to the west” in Russia, but it’s also so much more.  If you venture outside of the center, you can still find plenty of soviet feeling. I enjoy both the beautifully impressive architecture and the soviet buildings filled with more character than beauty. Kupchino can be an interesting place to find some of that feeling of the latter. While it has a reputation for being dangerous, it’s much safer than it used to be. I’d recommend taking the metro for a visit at least once to experience and capture a different vibe.  Beautiful Character Mixed with Interesting CharactersThere’s something very special about Saint-Petersburg. Its history, architecture, canals, colors, light, parks and culture come together in a magical way that is unlike any other city in the world. What makes it even better is the mix of characters and life Russia provides in such a beautiful and unique city. Interest is all around you with the backgrounds to help bring it together into a very photographable city.  If any of you have been to Saint-Petersburg before, tell me about your experience and impressions of the city and country in the comments below! And stay tuned for more on Saint-Petersburg, including some of the best Street Photography shots I captured while there. Click Here for More First Impressions on Cities Around the World (from a street photographer’s perspective)  Comment Here! Cancel replyFor patreon exclusive educational content:.  Limited Edition Postcard Prints! Street Photography Workshops Donations Always AppreciatedI'll always keep Shooter Files free for everyone, but any donations would be greatly appreciated and help me keep it going. Many thanks to everyone following along! Cheers! -f.d. walker Search the Files For Exclusive Patron Content:
Peter the Great's Summer Palace and GardensAcross the river from the Peter and Paul fortress and the wooden Cabin of Peter the Great you can visit the historical Summer Garden. Behind the beautiful wrought iron fence there is an old park that has witnessed some of the most spectacular moments in St. Petersburg's early history. Impressed by the royal parks that he had seen in Europe, Peter the Great was very keen to create something similar in his newly built "Venice of the North". In Peter's new park everything was created according to the latest fashions; the trees and bushes were trimmed in the most elaborate way and all the alleys were decorated with marble statues and fountains. Peter the Great used to organize regular receptions and balls in the gardens, his " assamblei ", which involved dancing and drinking and impressive firework displays. Tsar Peter commissioned the city's first and foremost architect, the Italian Domenico Trezzini, to build a small palace in the park. The palace had no heating and was intended only for summer time use, hence its name "Summer Palace", as opposed to the "Winter Palace" that Peter had built just down the same embankment of the Neva. The Summer Palace, a small two-storey yellow building, was built between 1710 and 1714, with 7 rooms on each floor. After the Second World War the palace was carefully restored, the older interiors were recreated and a collection of early 18 th century artifacts, many originally owned by Peter the Great , was put on display. It is always a great pleasure to take a stroll down the alleys of the Summer Garden, passing by the palace, the marvelous marble statues and the pond. A pair of white swans returns every year to the Karpiev pond in the Summer Garden, even though the park is located in the middle of a bustling city... We can help you make the right choice from hundreds of St. Petersburg hotels and hostels. Live like a local in self-catering apartments at convenient locations in St. Petersburg. Comprehensive solutions for those who relocate to St. Petersburg to live, work or study. Maximize your time in St. Petersburg with tours expertly tailored to your interests. Get around in comfort with a chauffeured car or van to suit your budget and requirements. Book a comfortable, well-maintained bus or a van with professional driver for your group. Navigate St. Petersburg’s dining scene and find restaurants to remember. Need tickets for the Mariinsky, the Hermitage, a football game or any event? We can help. Get our help and advice choosing services and options to plan a prefect train journey. Let our meeting and events experts help you organize a superb event in St. Petersburg. We can find you a suitable interpreter for your negotiations, research or other needs. Get translations for all purposes from recommended professional translators. The Summer I Turned Pretty Jenny HanGradeSaver offers study guides, application and school paper editing services, literature essays, college application essays and writing help. The Summer I Turned Pretty Material
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The Summer I Turned Pretty, published by Simon & Schuster, is a 2009 novel by author Jenny Han. A young adult romance, The Summer I Turned Pretty follows Isabel "Belly" Conklin's journey to adulthood over one unforgettable summer.As Belly navigates the challenges of growing up and her first love, she recalls moments from summers past that have affected her relationship with the Fisher ...
The Summer I Turned Pretty follows protagonist Belly as she, her brother, and her mother join the Fisher family for a tradition in which they spend summers at Cousins Beach. Through a narrative interspersed with flashbacks of past summers, the novel focuses on Belly's coming-of-age, her close relationships with the Fisher brothers Conrad and Jeremiah, and a new romantic relationship with a new ...
The Summer I Turned Pretty is a young-adult romance novel written by American author Jenny Han.It was published by Simon & Schuster in 2009 and it is the first book in The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy. The trilogy includes the sequels It's Not Summer Without You (2010), and We'll Always Have Summer (2011). Jenny Han is also known for her New York Times-bestselling books in the "To All ...
It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean.". In Chapter Four, Belly defines what happened during the summer that made her become "pretty.". Although the obvious answer would be that Belly's appearance changed, the real shift occurred in how Belly viewed ...
The Summer I Turned Pretty study guide contains a biography of Jenny Han, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes.
At the beginning of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly thinks of her mother as an unemotional, unerringly rational figure—preoccupied always with doing the practical thing and uninterested in hearing Belly's tales about boys, dresses, and teenage girlhood. This practicality is contrasted with Susannah's relative frivolity—as another ...
Introduction. "The Summer I Turned Pretty" by Jenny Han is a coming-of-age novel that follows the story of Isabel "Belly" Conklin as she spends another summer at Cousin's Beach. The novel explores themes of love, friendship, and self-discovery as Belly navigates the complexities of growing up and finding her place in the world.
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" by Jenny Han. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student ...
The Summer I Turned Pretty is an excellent example of how literature can be used to explore complex topics like personal growth while still providing an enjoyable reading experience for all ages. Related Essays. The Summer I Turned Pretty Poem Analysis. In the poem, "The Road Not Taken," the short story, "The Reunion, and the novel, The ...
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" by Jenny Han. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student ...
It was the summer I'd turn pretty. And that summer, it finally was, I was" (Han 21). In this quote, Belly was trying to change who she was too much which seemed okay at the time, but really wasn't a great idea towards the middle of the book. In the middle of the novel, Belly started to get more mature and understand more.
Historical and Literary Context of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" "The Summer I Turned Pretty," published in 2009, is the first book in Jenny Han's trilogy of the same name. The novel captures the transformative summer of 15-year-old Isabel "Belly" Conklin, who spends every summer at a beach house with her mother, brother, and family friends ...
"Now at least we've got a possible topic for that essay you have to write about what you did during your summer vacation." C. "Shut the hell up." 4 of 17
Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 ...
Shortly after 6 P.M., Trump strode onto the patio, wearing his customary dark suit and a blue tie, and launched into a stem-winder."It was so fucking funny," the person close to C.P.I. told me ...
The summer is definitely the best time to be in Saint-Petersburg. Due to its location up north, summer light can last almost 24 hours a day. While I was there, it didn't get dark until midnight, with the sun coming out again at 3am. Because of this, the city has the White Nights Festival during its longest days (a few weeks during June to July).
Belly, p. 10. Belly looks forward to summer every year, but this summer is special, for it is the one in which she has "turned pretty." With this newfound physical beauty, Belly finds herself attracting the romantic interest of the Fisher brothers, who had previously viewed her like a "little sister" for the first time.
Joseph Stalin's Cult Of Personality 1757 Words | 8 Pages. Therefore, despite the horrors of Stalin's regime, one could argue that the socialist realism paintings could 'mould the consciousness of the people' into believing that Stalin was a great and wise leader, a kind and humble man, and the father of all Soviet people, thus reinforcing his cult of personality that tries to portray him ...
The Summer Palace, a small two-storey yellow building, was built between 1710 and 1714, with 7 rooms on each floor. After the Second World War the palace was carefully restored, the older interiors were recreated and a collection of early 18 th century artifacts, many originally owned by Peter the Great, was put on display.
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