Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that Trump’s reelection is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are.
By David Remnick in The New Yorker (thanks to Ed M.)
On the morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about “deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails. But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.
Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring autocrat did not spell the end of America’s long, if profoundly imperfect, experiment in liberal democracy. History does not move in straight lines, he told them. Sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. It was a solemn, pastoral performance, and, on some level, Obama was also engaged in a form of self-soothing. Two days later, in an interview with The New Yorker, he again tried to keep despair at bay: “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” (continued)