This is Us

Thus commenceth the Reign of Witches.

“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” — Thomas Paine

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.” — Thomas Jefferson

It’s Wednesday morning. And despite everything, you are still not the crazy ones. But, damn.

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This is who we are

Greetings from Angoulême. I’d like to tell you that being separated by an ocean softens the blow, or provides some mitigating stoicism. But it doesn’t, because, like the rest of the world, we wake up to an almost incomprehensible political reality.

[From MSNBC Daily]

This is not the column I wanted to write, and it is certainly not the one you wanted to read today….

I’ll leave it to others to engage in the post-mortem finger-pointing and second-guessing; and I won’t try to sugar-coat the outcome or what it means.

But I would suggest taking a very deep breath. And another one. Because the fights ahead will be even tougher and more dangerous than the ones we’ve been through. 

There will be the inevitable and immediate attempts to downplay the threat of a second Trump presidency, but this time we need to take Trump both seriously and literally.

We can expect President Donald Trump to begin a massive purge of the federal workforce; and the process of mass deportations.

The reign of Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and RFK, Jr. will begin… Trump will pardon the January 6 rioters; and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he will instruct the DOJ to go after his political opponents. He will abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump will gut or kill Obamacare outright, while imposing massive new tariffs on the economy. 

We also know that the guardrails will not hold, because they did not hold before. If they had, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed. 

Whatever the final margin, the American people have returned this blatantly, dangerously unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the frauds, the lies, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign; not the insults, nor the threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His previously loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a “total fascist”; some of his closes aides and cabinet members described in detail his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution. 

But in the end, Trump was right. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still win a presidential election. But, we know now that it was worse. Trump never fired a weapon on a New York City street, but he stood at the center of our politics and incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. And it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that he tried to overturn a free and fair election. It didn’t matter that a jury of his peers found him liable for sexually aassaulting a woman; and it didn’t matter that he had called for terminating the rules found in the Constitution to restore him to power. And it didn’t matter when he lied about migrants eatings cats and dogs; or called the United States a “garbage can for the world.”

His campaign writes Susan Glasser, was “the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged.”

[As] Trump travelled the nation in his final push asking to be the only convicted felon in history to serve as President, he called Democrats “demonic” and repeatedly threatened to go after the “enemies within” and mused openly about inflicting violence on those enemies, whether Liz Cheney or members of the “fake news,” who, as he put it in a particularly vituperative rally speech in Pennsylvania on Sunday morning, might well come into the line of fire if someone were to go after him. “I don’t mind,” Trump said, of a would-be assassin taking a shot at the press. In just the past few days, he has promised a new Administration that will be “nasty.” He has vowed to “protect the women of our country . . . whether the women like it or not.” He has attacked Harris in vile personal terms and apparently agreed to unleash the science-denialism of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the entire U.S. health system. Tired Trump is often the most revealing version of Trump, and so perhaps it’s no mistake that at that Pennsylvania rally, Trump finally admitted publicly what he had privately told some of his advisers four years ago—that he did not willingly depart the White House after his 2020 defeat. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said.

And it worked.

This is the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and still said, “Yes, that’s what we want.” That’s who we are.

The whole world is watching. And that’s what they are seeing. 

We can change that, of course, because this isn’t the final chapter. But the fight will be long and even harder now that we have been stripped of so many of our illusions.

Nota Bene

Yascha Mounk: “The Dawn of the Trump Era.”

Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.

But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.

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