333 days and counting down

If Trump wins.

   

A topical series by eminent writers at The Atlantic. As I post this today, there are 24 essays. I've read them all. Should they append the list with additonal pieces, I will update it.

 

David Frum on autocracy
Anne Applebaum on NATO
McKay Coppins on the loyalists
Caitlin Dickerson on immigration
Barton Gellman on the Justice Department
Sophie Gilbert on misogyny
Zoë Schlanger on climate
George Packer on journalism
Sarah Zhang on science
Franklin Foer on corruption
Michael Schuman on China
Adam Serwer on the courts
Juliette Kayyem on extremism
Elaine Godfrey on abortion
Megan Garber on disinformation
Clint Smith on history
Ronald Brownstein on partisanship
David A. Graham on normalization
Vann R. Newkirk II on civil rights
Spencer Kornhaber on freedom
Tom Nichols on the military
Helen Lewis on the left
Jennifer Senior on anxiety
Mark Leibovich on America’s character
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Evidence had been the prime, almost exclusive, focus of our hearings. Our report also had to avoid exaggeration; we wanted its every paragraph and section to be meticulously sourced and supported.—Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor, pg 355

Seriously?

I finished Liz Cheney's new book last night. Bracing, impressive, important. I share very little in common with her politically, but I pored over this 11 hour read with extreme care and came away with great new respect for her and her J6 Committee effort. "Meticulously sourced and supported." Mission accomplished. You should read this book. And, all of The Atlantic pieces cited and linked above. I've been a subscriber for decades. Their latest stuff is better than ever. Highly recommend  that you subscribe.

Trump must be lawfully held to account, and politically defeated in 2024. The incriminating evidence against him is dispositive (an assertion I don't make lightly).

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared? —David Frum

Keepin' things classy, as always.

...In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Publicly, trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.—Tom Nichols

Facts are work. They require study; they require curiosity; they require patience; they require humility. Democracy requires the same. The demands of both become greater in an information environment teeming with stories that are ever more suspect—a place where truth has plausible deniability. Trump will ease the burden, he suggests: You can outsource your mind to his gut. You would be foolish not to. Science lies to you. Hollywood lies to you. The media lie to you. Books lie to you. Courts lie to you. Teachers lie to you. Other people lie to you. Democracy lies to you. The only thing you can trust, in this dizzying world, is the inveterate liar who would never lie to you.

A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.

This is how he has been so able to transform lies from liabilities into selling points. The falsehoods do not merely bend the truth. They obliterate it.—Megan Garber

“We are divided,” Stephen Colbert once observed, “between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” He was speaking in 2005, as the character he played on his TV show at the time: a buffoon who shouted his way into political relevance. Back then, that line was still a joke.—Megan Garber

 

UPDATE:  "How Trump would build his loyalty-first Cabinet"

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TANGENT: ANTHROPOCENE, MEET THE ASSHOLOCENE

In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?—Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

Yeah...

__________