Spy Mountain, the moniker for Mt. Avital, rises high on the Biblical Golan Heights. Surveillance antennas are conspicuous atop a heavily fortified installation. It’s Israel’s forward observation post peering into Syria; it’s also now the place from which Israel monitors Iran and its allies on the other side of the border. Roughly a kilometre away, on the Syrian side, is Sleeping Elephant Hill, nicknamed for its shape. In 2012, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its Hezbollah allies set up a signals-intelligence post on the hill to monitor Israel. In 2015, they attempted to set up a more robust military presence nearby. An Israeli air strike took out their reconnaissance team, including the Revolutionary Guard general Mohammad Ali Allah-Dadi and Jihad Mughniyah, the Iranian-trained son of Imad Mughniyah, the assassinated first military commander of Hezbollah.

As it usually does, Iran temporarily stepped back, regrouped, and modified its tactics. In 2016, the Revolutionary Guard started shipping kits to convert short-range rockets into longer-range missiles, with precision guidance systems capable of hitting strategic targets in Israel, from an electricity grid to an airport or a desalination plant. “That’s what’s called a game-changer,” Uzi Rubin, the former head of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization, told me. “They converted a weapon of terror into a military weapon for war. They’d only need two hundred to stop Israel’s ability to wage its own war.”

By early 2018, the Revolutionary Guard had deployed at some forty military facilities in Syria, with their own headquarters, drone-control rooms, and training centers. At least a third of them were deployed to target Israel, not just to prop up the Syrian regime in its civil war, Israeli defense officials told me. Since early 2017, Israel has launched more than two hundred strikes against Iranian targets in Syria—the most recent in August—to contain the buildup.

On a sunny day last year, I looked across a peaceful plateau that surrounds Spy Mountain and Sleeping Elephant Hill. The area is green with farmland, apple and pear orchards, and vineyards for Golan wine. Most of the time, it’s deceptively quiet. The Iranians are not visible. They now come and go dressed in Syrian military uniforms, a decoy tactic since Russia brokered a deal, a year ago, to keep Iran’s personnel and weaponry eighty-five kilometres from the border, Israeli officials told me. They’ve also hired residents in the Golan to work for them, as part of a widening network of armed allies in Syria, not all of whom are Syrian. And their weapons transfers keep coming.

Tehran and Jerusalem may be a thousand miles apart, but Iran’s so-called axis of resistance—which, by some counts, totals more than a hundred Shiite militias, with widely diverse manpower and matériel—has become entrenched across the Middle East, right up to Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Iran’s network spans half a dozen countries and has so fundamentally altered the region’s strategic balance that no nation can take on Iran and its proxies without risking multiple military challenges, major loss of life, devastating damage to infrastructure, or instability rippling through other nations. That applies even to the United States, nuclear-armed Israel, or Saudi Arabia, which spent fifty-five billion dollars—or roughly five times—more on defense in 2017 than Iran did.

Iran is unlikely to win a conflict. But it could insure that others don’t win, either, at least not in the classic sense of a decisive victory. If Israel tried to destroy Iran’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, “we would be able to destroy Beirut, but they would be able to destroy parts of Tel Aviv,” Eran Etzion, the former head of policy planning at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, told me.

The same general principle applies to other countries contemplating military action against Iran after the September 14th attack on two Saudi sites that process more than half of the kingdom’s oil production. The Trump Administration blamed Tehran. On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense displayed parts of the weapons used in the attacks by eighteen unmanned drones and seven cruise missiles. Iran “sponsored” them, it claimed.

En route to Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters that the attack was “an act of war.” In an interview with CNN on Thursday, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, shot back with a warning of “all-out war” with “a lot of casualties” if the United States or Saudi Arabia strikes Iran. “I am making a very serious statement that we don’t want to engage in a military confrontation,” he said. “But we won’t blink to defend our territory.”

Iran could respond to any strike on its territory by unleashing its allies elsewhere in the Middle East, as it did in the nineteen-eighties, when it aided proxies that bombed two U.S. embassies and the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon. The attacks ended up forcing the Reagan Administration to withdraw its peacekeepers.

Iran’s oldest, most sophisticated, and best-armed proxy is Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Iraq has the largest collection of Iranian-backed militias—more than sixty. Some are decades old; others are new. Syria hosts a growing array of Iran-orchestrated warlords, gangs, and armed groups created during the chaos of its civil war. Iran also arms and trains Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who claimed the September 14th attack on Saudi oil installations, and Hamas, which rules the West Bank, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Among the more recent Iranian-mobilized militias are the Fatemiyoun, from Afghanistan, and the Zainabiyoun, from Pakistan. “Iran wants hegemony in the region not by re-creating the Persian Empire that occupied all lands to Egypt but, this time, by building up a satellite force across the region,” Rubin told me. Last year, the U.S. National Defense Strategy, the first in a decade, concluded, “In the Middle East, Iran is competing with its neighbors, asserting an arc of influence and instability while vying for regional hegemony, using state-sponsored terrorist activities, a growing network of proxies, and its missile program to achieve its objectives.”

The Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, aimed at squeezing Iran economically, and Israel’s air strikes on Iranian targets in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq have had limited impact, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Affairs. “There has been an increase in the overall size and capability of foreign forces that are partnered with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,” Seth Jones, a former adviser to the commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Forces, wrote. “Iran’s economic woes have not contributed to declining activism in the region.”

What’s shifted in recent years is Iran’s ability to consolidate allies and proxies into a web or grid that can operate regionally. The Islamic Republic facilitates the movement of militias to bolster other allies. The Quds Force pulled Shiite militias from Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to fight in Syria. In 2014, it manipulated the transfer of militias from the Shiite-dominated region of southern Iraq to Sunni regions in the north, to fight ISIS. It has fostered offshoots of Hezbollah in Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf, albeit with mixed effectiveness. “What matters is that Iran can now connect the dots—from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq,” an Israeli defense official told me.

Iran’s allies in the axis of resistance have, in turn, entered politics, transforming armed movements into powerful players in governments that decide policy. They’re altering the political status quo across the Middle East, too. Hezbollah emerged from the underground in 1992 to run for parliament in Lebanon, the most Westernized Arab country. Today, it has seats in parliament and also cabinet posts, and the Christian President is its hand-picked ally. By 2003, Iran had deepened its presence in Iraq through a network of Shiite militias commanded by Iranian-trained operatives. By 2014, a proliferating array of militias—with tens of thousands of fighters—merged into the Popular Mobilization Forces (P.M.F.) to fight ISIS after the Iraqi Army collapsed. The Baghdad government put them on its payroll. In 2016, Parliament made the P.M.F. an independent arm of Iraq’s security forces. In 2018, militia leaders and politicos ran for parliament. They now constitute one of the strongest blocs and had a major role in selecting Iraq’s latest Prime Minister.

In Yemen, the Houthis are a political movement—called Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”—and also a militia. In 2015, they seized control of Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, and ousted the government. The Houthis now rule much of northern Yemen. Iran’s role in arming and training the Houthis has deepened since Saudi Arabia launched an air war against the Shiite rebels, four years ago. Iranian missiles and drones have allegedly been used in targeting Saudi installations. Under Iranian tutelage, Hezbollah has created a branch in Yemen.

Iran has even out-gamed Israel—despite Tehran’s military limits, economic woes, and diplomatic challenges. “Israel is tactical. Iran is strategic. Israel is short-term, Iran is long-term,” Etzion said. “Iran is the master of the indirect proxy war—and Israel is not.”

From Iran’s prism, it’s a survival strategy—defensive rather than offensive. “Iran feels strategically lonely,” Nasser Hadian, a U.S.-educated political scientist at the University of Tehran, told me. Strengthening Shiite minorities across the region—whether arming or politically empowering them—is Iran’s ultimate line of defense. The common denominator is Iran’s Quds Force and its commander, General Qassem Soleimani, a former bodybuilder turned military commander, who has become Iran’s strategic puppeteer. He has been photographed with Shiite militias across the Middle East. Iran may now be able to count on more than a hundred and eighty thousand armed men in proxy forces in six countries—Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—Jones wrote, in the C.S.I.S. report. That’s an increase of up to fifty thousand since 2011.

Israelis once called their tensions with Iran a “shadow war,” designed to contain Tehran and deter a full-fledged conflict. Since May, however, confrontations with Iran have been in full view: Ever more sophisticated attacks against Israel. Six foreign tankers sabotaged outside the Strait of Hormuz. A sophisticated American drone shot down off the Iranian coast. And now attacks on major Saudi oil installations. In each incident, Tehran has been implicated, directly or indirectly. It no longer has a credible route to plausible deniability. Having covered every conflict in the Middle East since the 1973 War, I’ve been asking all week: How much longer will the Golan—or any other place in the Middle East—stay quiet amid these mounting tensions?

When I heard, a couple of years ago, that the director James Gray was working on a movie set in outer space, I was worried. Gray is a filmmaker whose work conveys a powerful sense of place; for him to be filming in a dark void or a closed capsule struck me as an obstacle at best and a recipe for disaster at worst. I should have had more confidence in the judgment and inclinations of a filmmaker as original as he is—and, especially, a filmmaker whose ideas about the art of cinema are inseparable from his relentless self-questioning. In “Ad Astra,” which opens on Friday, Gray travels far afield to reach far within himself; the movie is something like his own refraction of a Terrence Malick film, a conjuring of deep subjectivity in deep space. In some essential ways, Gray, escaping from the confines of familiar earthbound realism, goes aesthetically further than he has ever gone before.

A basic problem for filmmakers to overcome in space movies is the demand of exposition. The required world-building of a movie about hypothetical lives in the imaginary future would seem to work at cross purposes to Gray’s usual method, which is to take the recognizable and infuse it, from the start, with a personal and distinctive tone. It turns out, though, that “Ad Astra” stands the world-building on its head, with ingenious touches that render the strange familiar and the implausible obvious—only to then fracture those instant new commonplaces with psychological turmoil. The canniness of Gray’s procedure is matched by the boldness, even the recklessness, of the extremes to which he pushes it—along with his characters, his story, his emotions, and his techniques. The result is to turn “Ad Astra” into an instant classic of intimate cinema—one that requires massive machinery and complex methods to create a cinematic simplicity that, for all the greatness of his earlier films, had eluded him until now.

“Ad Astra,” which Gray co-wrote with Ethan Gross, is set in the late twenty-first century, at a time when travel to the moon, and even to Mars, is ordinary. A highly skillful and esteemed astronaut, Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), is tapped for a critical and unusual assignment: a series of “power surges” is threatening life on Earth, and they’re thought to be coming from near Neptune—the site of a mission from twenty-five years earlier, the Lima Project, which was headed by McBride’s father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones). Clifford was the most decorated astronaut of all, a pioneer on Jupiter and Saturn. But his mission has long been deemed lost and he is presumed to be dead; neither Roy nor anyone else has heard from him in sixteen years. Now the agency believes that the Lima vessel has survived, that Clifford is alive, and that he’s behind the release of antimatter (the vessel’s fuel) that’s causing the surge—so they recruit Roy to contact Clifford in the hope of getting him to stop. In order to send that message, Roy is dispatched to a base beneath the surface of Mars, the last undamaged site capable of sending signals to Neptune. When that effort fails, Roy decides to take matters into his own hands, becoming a stowaway on another mission to Neptune—a search-and-destroy mission targeting the Lima—in the hope of finding his father. Yet that mission quickly turns calamitous, and Roy finds himself making the long journey from Mars to the vicinity of Neptune all alone; that solitude, along with his inevitable encounter both with wreckage in distant space and (avoiding spoilers) with the version of his father that he finds there, is the core of the movie.

All space-travel movies are inevitably in dialogue with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Gray’s film is explicitly so, from the very start, with a nod to “2001” ’s famous Star Gate sequence, in which the astronaut Bowman gets caught in Jupiter’s gravitational field and is subject to body-shaking, mind-bending, time-bending pressures. At the start of “Ad Astra,” Gray offers an extended extreme closeup of Roy being subjected to the jittery and distorting shake of a space mission, with eerily pure gleams of light on his helmet’s glassy mask—but without the hallucinatory visions. Right away, the movie plunges the viewer into the physical stresses and mental demands of space travel, its expansion and compression of the very nature of human experience—inner experience—and then, soon thereafter, anchors Roy in life at home.

As ever in Gray’s films, the drama of “Ad Astra” is a tale of generational conflict that repeats itself in the protagonist’s romantic and professional struggles, a story that distills personal backstory into a form of living, firsthand mythology. Roy remains emotionally scarred by his father’s absence, and, in the course of his quest for a desperate, possibly deadly reunion, the scars become all the clearer. The ferocity of Roy’s determination comes at the cost of an emotional life, an openness, a vulnerability that he has suppressed with great effort. He’s failing to connect with his wife (Liv Tyler). He literally can’t stand to be touched by his colleagues. But the preternatural calm that he displays, an essentially superhuman quality (its medical correlate is a heart rate that, despite any stresses, never rises above eighty), isn’t so much a willed coldness as a tensely contained heat, a fire driven far within to become a source of power.

As in a Malick movie, Roy’s voice, echoing in his own mind, is on the soundtrack, his inner life rendered in an internal monologue that haunts the movie from start to finish. That voice is both dramatic and poetic, informational and expressive, collecting shards of observations and reminiscences, pushing unrelieved tensions to the fore and turning his story into a crisis of consciousness. The continuities in Gray’s work are, above all, ones of mood and tone; in a sense, his very subject is the fictitious unity of character and of appearances. I’ve always considered him to be a brilliant depictor of practicalities yet a faux realist, whose depictions nearly shatter under the strain of the emotional world that they contain—an emotional world that thrums like a mighty undercurrent beneath the often still surfaces of his images.

Those practicalities get especially glorious treatment in “Ad Astra.” Gray conjures the future in grandly imaginative touches that link it giddily to the present day while signalling its alienating strangeness. As travel to the moon and to Mars have become common practices, they’ve become infected with the oppressive trivializations of train stations and airports—a Subway franchise, a Hudson News kiosk, and a host of bureaucratic annoyances and intrusions. (Natasha Lyonne does a brief and brilliant turn as one of those bureaucrats.) Spaceships have all the charm of airplanes, complete with overpriced and doled-out extras. Yet this banalization of space travel also has a bigger and grimmer set of consequences: the moon has become a political battleground, a literal war zone with undefined borders, menacing marauders, and international conflicts that makes one officer describe it as the Wild West—a flip term hinting at a deadly battle that Roy will have to face there in order to pursue his mission. (There’s some notable political world-building, too, in Roy’s mention of the Arctic as a war zone and his passing lament that yet another war over natural resources seems to be brewing.)

Gray daringly depicts the physical environment of space along with the political disturbances. A trip to the dark side of the moon is realized with a straightforward sense of pictorial astonishment. The film offers moments of indelible sublimity, including one sequence that’s among the most sensuously beautiful I’ve seen in recent years, where Roy floats weightlessly while grasping the long blade of a slow-turning antenna near the rings of Neptune. One of the great achievements of “Ad Astra” is textural: working with the cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (who’s been to space in “Interstellar,” in flight with “Dunkirk,” and in the future with “Her”), Gray shot “Ad Astra” on film. That decision doesn’t guarantee a rich and nuanced range of textures (for instance, “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” shot on film, has none), but Gray revels in the grain of the medium, its kaleidoscopic and pointillistic swarm of color and forms. These rich images converge with the shuddering profundity of the emptiness of space, as well as with Roy’s closely scrutinized range of expressions and, for that matter, the tightly observed skin and stubble of Pitt’s face.

That physicality is built into “Ad Astra,” for which Gray, Nathan Heller explains in his Profile of the director in The New Yorker, relied less on digital effects than on physical ones, including stunts done by Pitt himself. Though there’s no obvious way to detect the method of filming, something of its demanding austerity comes through in the finished product, in its tone and its spirit: outer space may be seemingly infinite in its expanses, but the possibilities of human action within it are hard-won and limited. The cinematic wonders on display in “Ad Astra” are tamped down, kept minimal, emphasizing the conjoined astonishments of simple observations and human burdens—whether physical, emotional, or moral. The musical score, by Max Richter, is likewise applied very sparingly; Gray keeps silence, breath, inner and outer voices, and the practical sounds of the mission at the center of the experience. The drama of his stories, meanwhile, serve his movies like libretti, and his images have the dominant and instantly recognizable depth, range, and distinctiveness of musical composition; they’re the principal source of the movie’s emotional power, what a viewer will come away humming.

“Ad Astra” features Roy in a remarkable series of one-on-one dramatic confrontations: with an elder officer named Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), who was Clifford’s friend; with another officer on Mars, named Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), whose frustrating relegation to the base evokes both enduring forms of discrimination and a tale of stifled interplanetary political conflict; and, of course, above all, with his father. But Pitt’s performance is less a matter of duets than a series of onscreen solos, centered on the furious stillness of his face and its frozen evocation of volcanic passion and pressurized depths. He conveys the solidity and the opacity, the reverberant presence of classic-era movie stars, and does so below the skin, as well. In a moment of nervousness when Roy learns of his mission and of his father’s possible survival, a closeup displays an uncontrollable tremor beneath Roy’s—Pitt’s—lower left eyelid. (It’s a moment reminiscent of another of the most extraordinary closeups in film history, of Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli’s “The Clock.”) Later, when Roy realizes that he’s getting near his father again, and will soon see him for the first time since he was a child, Pitt seems to de-age on camera, to become boyish in real time, as if, even more than his expression, his very features are reverting. I haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” yet, a film that’s already famous, before its release, for the digital de-aging to which it subjected Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, yet I’d be surprised if that technology achieves a cinematic rejuvenation of such transformative emotional power.

This past week, Tom Steyer visited the Hamburg Inn No. 2, a family diner in Iowa City that has drawn the likes of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, not to mention the fictional congressman Matt Santos, of Texas, on a surprisingly faithful episode of “The West Wing.” Inside the wood-panelled dining room, television crews readied themselves by the kitchen doors and servers swerved past with Sloppy Joes and slices of homemade cherry pie. As Steyer made the rounds, most of the diners ignored him, seemingly accustomed to the intrusion. Others, like Linda Annis, a business administrator, had shown up specifically to meet the candidate. She saved Steyer a seat at her table, where she sat with two friends, and beckoned over members of the press, describing her group as “Republicans who love a Democrat.”

“You’re a Republican?” one of her friends asked, from across the table.

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“I was,” she said. “Before Trump.” She pointed to Steyer. “Now I love him.”

Steyer, who has sandy-blond hair and an air of West Coast vigor, represents the antithesis of Trump in more than a few respects. But his candidacy, like Trump’s, rests on the premise that a billionaire who has never held office is well suited to the White House. This was only Steyer’s second trip to Iowa as a candidate, but, as he stressed to everyone, he has local roots. His late uncle, Sam Fahr, taught constitutional law at the University of Iowa for decades; that afternoon, Steyer planned to visit his ninety-nine-year-old aunt at the Oaknoll Retirement Community, a few blocks away. At a booth in the back of the Hamburg Inn, Steyer told two diners who identified themselves as local businessmen that he had earned an M.B.A. at Stanford. When one of the men remarked that the degree sounded expensive, Steyer, unfazed, recounted what he described as “the biggest fight I ever had with my father.” His old man wanted to pay his tuition, but Steyer, a recent alumnus of Yale, where he graduated with highest honors and captained the varsity soccer team, wanted to support himself. In the end, Steyer said, “I wrote the check, but my father deposited the money in my account anyway.”

Steyer’s aim in these interactions, he later explained to me, is to neutralize the negative connotations of his wealth. For all his fortune, he dresses modestly. His watch, he told me, costs a hundred and fifty dollars. He sticks to one tie, a handsome tartan number, and his colorful belt, fashioned by female artisans in Kenya, functions less as a statement piece than as a conversation starter, an opportunity to remind Americans that “the world is a better place when we educate women and girls.” He spurns private air travel and other wasteful habits; earlier this summer, dismounting the soapbox on a sweltering day in August, he refused a plastic water bottle from a supporter at the state fair. “I would assume that the first thing people know about me is that I’m a billionaire,” Steyer said. “The first thing I have to do is to explain that that’s not really who I am.”

Until July, when Steyer announced his candidacy, he had occupied a comfortable perch on the sidelines of the political establishment. After stepping down, in 2012, from the helm of Farallon Capital Management, his investment firm, Steyer directed a sizable portion of his wealth—some of which stems from investments in fossil-fuel companies—toward national efforts to curb the influence of corporate power in politics. (Steyer claims to have divested his personal funds from dirty projects, though confidentiality agreements prevent him from disclosing the entirety of his assets.) As an activist, Steyer has organized voter-turnout movements and underwritten the campaigns of Democratic congressional candidates in swing districts, spending more than a hundred million dollars in the most recent midterm elections. A hint of self-promotion has always shadowed these efforts; Steyer, brawny and voluble, has appeared in self-financed commercials for the better part of the decade, and he has flirted with runs for office before. One of the clearest signs that he might consider a bid for the country’s highest office came in 2017, when Trump responded to Steyer’s impeachment campaign by calling him “wacky & totally unhinged,” an insult that appeared to double as an anointment. In January, Steyer denied rumors that he might run, telling the press that he preferred to continue his efforts to take down Trump from a distance. When he reneged on this pledge, launching his bid with a four-minute video focussed on his political philanthropy and grassroots credentials, the decision seemed both surprising and inevitable. The patron of the Party had at last become the opponent of its front-runners.

Steyer is now the eleventh candidate to qualify for next month’s Democratic debates. His addition to the lineup, which might force networks, once again, to spread the proceedings across two nights, appeared to be the result of an expensive advertising blitz unrivalled by any of Steyer’s opponents. Bernie Sanders, who has said that he likes Steyer personally, told Andrea Mitchell, of MSNBC, that he was “a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Elizabeth Warren, on Twitter, expressed a pointed belief that “the Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves.” Earlier this summer, before Steyer entered the race, the Times asked the Democratic field whether anyone deserved to have a billion dollars. More than a few of the candidates said no.

Part of the challenge for Steyer, at this stage, is that his ideology does not especially distinguish him from many of his competitors. Were he a moderate, his late entry in the race might seem clearer—to rope the Party back toward centrist pragmatism. Instead, Steyer has cast himself as an outsider capable of realizing even the most progressive campaign promises. “My basic thesis is that we have a broken government,” he told me, adding that the top three candidates in the polls have served in Congress or the Senate for about seventy years. “We have to stop the corporations’ stranglehold on this government. So, if that is the issue, the question is who’s going to be credible in terms of making that happen.”

In his early visits to Iowa, though, his bid has felt somewhat abstract. When, at the diner, he roved from table to table, asking Iowans to name their top policy concerns, the impression was of a cheery executive crowdsourcing his own priorities. During another stump speech on his swing, Steyer outlined the five priorities central to his political identity—voting-rights protections, a clean environment, a complete education, a living wage, and good health—and pointed out that none of the candidates at the previous night’s debate had brought up the climate crisis. He later told me that the first debates, which he found uninspiring, had contributed to his decision to run. “I felt they weren’t really getting down to the nub of what’s going on in the United States,” he said, of the other candidates. “I am categorically, qualitatively different, and, in my opinion, what I am saying is much more realistic and much more significant than anything they’re saying. As far as I’m concerned, I have a very simple task—not an easy task, but simple—to try and see if I have something important to say to the American people.”

On Friday, a few dozen people, mostly seniors, convened in Maquoketa for a town hall hosted by Bob Osterhaus, a pharmacist who served in the Iowa state legislature until 2004. Osterhaus has seen a number of politicians pass through his home, including Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd, and John Dean, who told Osterhaus’s wife that her cinnamon rolls were the best he’d ever had. “It’s always interesting when a rich man decides to get in and try to act like a commoner,” Osterhaus said of Steyer before the event. The candidate was running late. When he arrived, a number of audience members praised him for his tough stance on Trump and his enduring advocacy for impeachment. “Look,” Steyer told the crowd. “Mr. Trump was a fake and a failure as a businessman. He played a businessman on TV, but his actual business career was a resounding failure.” Steyer reminded the group that he had started his own company “in one room, with no windows and no employees,” and built a “multibillion-dollar international business,” only to give it up because of his concern for the public sector. By the end of the event, Osterhaus, who seemed impressed, dismissed any suggestion that Steyer’s wealth was a liability. “The people voted for Trump,” Osterhaus said. In theory, he added, “Why the hell wouldn’t they vote for Steyer?”

Steyer, of course, lacks a few of the advantages that propelled Trump to the nomination, most notably a preëxisting aura of celebrity and an aggrieved constituency whose interests he appears to represent better than the other candidates. Another difference is that Steyer appeals more to optimism than to aggrievement. “I do think we have to take back our government, and I do think we need to stabilize this climate crisis,” he said toward the end of his speech. “But I want to point out that, if we do, we are in the best position of any people in the history of this planet. We are rich enough and we are technologically capable enough to guarantee a level of security and support for every American better than people understand.” It was an enticing vision—a taste of optimism in a race that has mostly evoked catastrophe. As a donor and an idealist, he has demonstrated his ability to marshal support for worthy causes. The greater challenge will be doing the same when the cause is himself.