Cluster B

Part I of an exploration of Donald Trump's psychopathology and ours.

🚨 BREAKING: Sinwar is dead. I’ll write about this in another newsletter.

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Twelve months ago in Brussels, I
Heard the same wishful thinking sigh
As round me, trembling on their beds,
Or taut with apprehensive dreads,
The sleepless guests of Europe lay
Wishing the centuries away,
And the low mutter of their vows
Went echoing through her haunted house
As on the verge of happening
There crouched the presence of The Thing,
All formulas were tried to still
The scratching on the window-sill,
All bolts of custom made secure
Against the pressure on the door,
But up the staircase of events
Carrying his special instruments,
To every bedside all the same
The dreadful figure swiftly came.

After three insufferably muggy months together the State House in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention formed a committee to put their decisions in writing. The windows of the State House had been shuttered for privacy—and to keep flies from biting the delegates’ stockings—and those in attendance had been sworn to secrecy. They formed another committee, the Committee of Style and Arrangement, to debate the finishing touches, then handed the document to Jacob Shallus, a clerk for the Pennsylvania assembly, for engrossing.

Shallus painstakingly transcribed the document onto the vellum parchment, using a goose quill. That manuscript, signed in the sweltering summer of 1787, is on display in the Rotunda of the National Archives. I’ve seen it only once. I was in my early twenties, visiting the archives for my doctoral research. I’d made no plan to see it, but I saw the signs pointing to it, so of course I decided to look.

There were no crowds. I was almost alone in the room. There was no heavy security, no metal detector, no Marines standing guard. Yellow filters protect the manuscript, I later learned, from damaging light rays, which is why it seems to glow. As I approached the yellowed parchment in its glass case, the familiar script, with those familiar words, came into focus, and my eyes filled with tears.

My grandparents were immigrants, refugees from the Nazis. The story of their desperate flight across Europe’s ravaged borders, the SS on their heels, was an aspect of my history no more remarkable to me, when I was a child, than the sound of musicians playing chamber music in the living room. Children accept everything as normal. No one ever told me about the Holocaust because no one needed to; I always knew. But I also grew up knowing I lived in a the freest, most generous, and most decent country in the world, and my God, was I grateful for it. I never felt anything but wholly American. Not one person ever caused me to doubt it, and had they tried, I would have found it absurd, not sinister.

I may be projecting my own experiences on to her, but I sense that in this respect, Kamala Harris might be like me. She’s about my age. We grew up in the same part of America. Her parents were immigrants. Her family story would lend itself to her feeling this way. Her mother was born in Madras in 1938. I visited Madras more than fifty years later. It made a big impact on me. I knew no one in America would believe me if I tried to describe India’s poverty to them, because I didn’t understand it until I saw it.

Kamala visited India as a child. She spent time in Jamaica, too, and Zambia. I have no reason to doubt this article’s description of the impact it had on her:

… After [her mother] Shyamala divorced [her father] Donald in the early 1970s, she brought her daughters back to India often, usually to Chennai, where her parents settled after [her grandfather] Gopalan retired. As the eldest grandchild, Kamala sometimes tagged along on Gopalan’s walks with his retiree buddies, soaking up their debates about building democracy and fighting corruption in India. “My grandfather felt very strongly about the importance of defending civil rights and fighting for equality and integrity,” Harris said. “I just remember them always talking about the people who were corrupt versus the people who were real servants.”

It had to have occurred to her that being born in America meant her life would be nothing like that of anyone in India. She must have noticed that the doors of opportunity swung open for her, as they did for me, that she faced none of the obstacles her mother had faced. There would be no arranged marriage for her, no lifetime of backbreaking drudgery. He mother came to America in the hope of becoming a scientist. She became a distinguished cancer researcher. Her father left Jamaica in the hope of becoming an academic. He became an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. No matter what you had left behind, America’s bounty worked as advertised on the box.

Like everyone in the 60s, her parents were attracted to a lot of postcolonial twaddle. But the reality of your parents’ lives tends to impress you more than what they say about it. It can’t have escaped Kamala Harris that America was a land of opportunity so remarkable that the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants could, if she worked hard enough, become the President of the United States—and that she was very, very lucky to have been born an American.

I may be imagining all of this. But if I am, it still tells you something about how I saw the world. I do believe, though, that her outrage with Donald Trump is absolutely sincere. It’s not a pose at all. I suspect that like mine, her outrage is personal. It is not just that Trump is wildly unfit, profoundly dangerous, and outrageously un-American—though that would be more than enough. It’s that Donald Trump, by exposing as hollow everything she believed America to be, has destabilized her sense of who she is.

I can’t say for sure whether she and I really have that in common. But it seems plausible enough. It makes me like her to think so, a little bit.

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In the past week, I’ve found every excuse imaginable not to write this newsletter. The election is nineteen days away, and if ever there was a moment for me to use whatever gifts God gave me, it’s now. But I haven’t been able to write a word.

I’ve spent each day discovering that I would prefer to do anything but try to make sense of the day’s news. You’d be astonished to know how much time an adult woman can spend making a toy birdie for her kittens. Mice, too. And a snake and a bug. I also like to lie on the floor with them and chatter at the laser pointer.

Yes, I understand this is a case study in neurotic self-sabotage. But why?

… Claire B., 56, professional writer, presents with an alert demeanor, complains she has suddenly lost her ability to write. She reports no other significant concerns regarding her mental or emotional well-being. She describes her mood as stable and expresses satisfaction with her personal life. She denies feelings of depression or pervasive anxiety but notes occasional “volcanic fury” when she thinks about Donald Trump. When discussing her daily routine, she casually mentions spending “every waking minute” following the news about the upcoming election but downplays its significance in her life. Sleep patterns are regular and appetite is normal. On further examination, patient reveals that she has spent the past week chattering at a laser pointer. Refer for neurological consult.

There’s no point in me trying to write about the news from the rest of the world. No one cares. Put a pin anywhere on the map of the world and the only story, really, is the US election. Yes, the wars grind on. The diplomats meet. The chancelleries issue urgent communiques. The North Koreans have entered the war in Europe. ISIS is planning a spectacular attack. The Irish? Screw them.

But the world around, everyone knows there’s a coin-flip’s chance that on November 5, we’ll vote to bring the American experiment to an end, having concluded (despite what looked to most people like a pretty good run) that it just didn’t work and the old ways of governing human affairs were better.

It will come down to a handful of “low-propensity” voters in Pennsylvania or North Carolina. Taut with dread, most of the world is pleading, “Don’t do it,” while the jokers are rubbing their hands together gleefully and crooning—“Do it, do it.” But they can’t hear us. They think that maybe Door Number Two leads to something nice. Like zombies, they walk toward it inexorably.

This isn’t like the last two times we put ourselves through this nightmare. The world is different, for one thing. But so are we.

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Of course, I am not in America. I can’t be absolutely sure that I my sense of this is what it would be if I were. But recently, I’ve read too many eerily precise descriptions of what I’ve been observing from here to think that I’m just imagining it.

Charlie Warzel just published an article in the Atlantic called, “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is.”

You and me both, Charlie, you and me both.

The teaser says: “The truth is it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.”

… As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the US government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

“It is difficult,” he writes, “to capture the nihilism of the current moment.”

That’s just how it looks to me—as if Americans have been bubbling in a cauldron of berserk for so long that they can no longer tolerate even a homeopathic dose of reality. It’s not just that we have a few people with a couple of nutty beliefs. It’s that so many, maybe the majority, have no sane beliefs left at all.

Warzel continues. Calling it “misinformation,” he writes, doesn’t convey the darkness of what’s really happening,

which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

I could offer examples of this, but I suspect I don’t need to.

Brian Klaas

gropes at the same problem, writing of Elon Musk’s Perfect Disinformation Machine. Musk, he writes, ‘has engineered his most revolutionary invention yet: the perfect mechanism to turn money into lies and lies into money.”

It works like this: in one end, you stick in $44,000,000,000. The Machine slurps that cash up, sputters to life, and it begins. A slow burning fire ignites, relentlessly incinerating most of that cash. As the money disappears, out the other end shoots a dystopian firehose of conspiracy theories and lies, knocking reality-based sense out of Americans until they are eagerly making egregiously foolish, catastrophic decisions, all while turning millions of brains to mush.

Once sufficient gobs of neural matter have degenerated into an unfortunate wet ooze, the most spectacular David Attenborough-worthy display will inevitably follow. Millions upon millions of Muskian keyboard warriors who have been drawn into the machine will begin to proudly define themselves as independent thinkers. To showcase their independent critical thought, they will, in seemingly coordinated unison, howl their shared, newfound battle cry into the digital ether whenever they encounter a bigoted viewpoint: “FREE SPEECH!”

But this is not a story of ridicule. Instead, it is a story of high-stakes political devastation. Hidden changes are warping the already broken ecosystem that determines how many citizens—particularly in America—construct their sense of reality. The Machine is now approaching new and dangerous frontiers. And eventually, whether imminently or in the not-so-distant future, Musk’s powerful information weapon is going to cause major harm to us all.

It’s worth pointing out that Adam Garfinkle has described this phenomenon more completely than anyone else:

Many of us old enough to remember reality as it existed a few decades back, and fortunately educated enough to be able to share thinking about it, have struggled to express just how qualitatively different the present para-mythic moment feels from the former norm. For some it is as though the culture, hauling the nation’s politics along with it, has done a Rip van Winkle on itself—rising from a long slumber to find itself in a waking dream, or nightmare, that does not much resemble normality back when we laid head on pillow. For others it feels like the nation has gone through a 21st-century looking glass in a futile search for Alice (or Alice’s restaurant, as the case may be). …

Adam thinks tech’s to blame:

The basic thesis is simple enough, through it can be shocking to many when first encountered and so is worth repeating in slightly different words: Cybertech developments have rewired our brains and rejiggered our endocrinal norms to a point so far beyond our evolutionary inheritance that we are now experiencing unprecedented trouble keeping track of what is real and what is surreal.

He’s right that it fits the timeline.¹ It was Adam who warned me, before I had even heard the term “Deep Fake,” that this technology would sever our last gossamer tie to observable reality. He didn’t even know, when he wrote that article, that Large Language Models would be galloping in with them.

I suppose one needs no laser-light of insight to grasp why I’m managing to do everything but write about my native country. I can’t bear it. It’s like looking at the Sun.

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It’s the tech, yes. But none of this could be happening at such a breathtaking pace, with such evil consequences, if we had not suffered a moral collapse every bit as shocking as our break from reality, but much harder to explain.

As I was thinking this, I came across another article in the Atlantic, this one by Peter Wehner, expressing this point. “This election is different,” he writes. “No election prior to the Trump era, regardless of the outcome, ever caused me to question the fundamental decency of America.” (My italics.)

The nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is a squalid figure, and the squalor is not subtle. His vileness, his lawlessness, and his malevolence are undisguised. At this point, it is reasonable to conclude that those qualities are a central part of Trump’s appeal to many of the roughly 75 million people who will vote for him in three weeks. They revel in his vices; they are vivified by them. Folie à millions.

Trump may lose the election, and by that loss America may escape the horrifying fate of another term. But we have to acknowledge this, too: The man whom the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” is in a razor-thin contest against Kamala Harris, a woman who, whether you agree with her or not, is well within the normal boundaries of American politics. If he loses, he will not concede. Trump will instead attempt to tear the country apart. He can count on the near-total support of his party, and the majority of the white evangelical world.

“This should leave the rest of us shaken,” he continues. Not because the United States has ever been free of fault. (He takes care to catalogue our many crimes, from slavery to child labor.)

But what makes this moment different, and unusually dangerous, is that we have never before had a president who is sociopathic; who relishes cruelty and encourages political violence; who refers to his political opponents as “vermin,” echoing the rhetoric of 20th-century fascists; who resorts to crimes to overturn elections, who admires dictators and thrives on stoking hate. Trump has never been well, but he has never been this unwell. The prospect of his again possessing the enormous power of the presidency, this time with far fewer restraints, is frightening.

He also describes a conversation with the writer Jonathan Rauch. Rauch reminded him that the Founders warned us about men like Trump, and gave us many safeguards with which to protect ourselves—which aren’t working. Rauch told him: “My faith in democracy is breaking. Part of me is breaking with it.”

Me, too.

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This is the third time that Americans have been forced to debate, in all seriousness, whether electing a limitlessly malignant and limitlessly ignorant reality television star to the Presidency would be a good idea. Three times. The words, “This is not who we are” are no longer even faintly plausible. This is exactly who we are.

Each time we’ve debated the pros and cons of handing this madman our nuclear arsenal, the evidence has been stronger than the last—much stronger— that it would be a very poor idea indeed. But the arguments to this effect—the op-eds and fact-checks and podcasts and tweets and God-knows-how many gallons of ink and billions of pixels spent cataloguing everything that bloated sociopath says and does; all the evidence that’s been marshaled, the indictments, figurative and literal—they’ve been for naught, because this isn’t a debate about the facts. The people who plan to vote for him have known all of it from the very first second. They know exactly what he is. They’re not voting for him because they don’t know better. They’re voting for him because they do. I can’t tell you why they want this, but they’re out of excuses. No one believes them anymore. It’s not about policy. It’s not about the border. It’s not about inflation, or men playing in women’s sports. It is about returning to something ancient as the primordial ooze.

Ahead of America is a horror, and everyone knows this. If he wins, he’ll do his best to be a tyrant; if he loses, he’ll do his best to incite a civil war.² We know some hideous convulsion is coming in November sure as we know that Christmas is coming in December.

We’re no longer a people who, every four years, carry off the miracle of a routine, peaceful transfer of power. And as Rauch pointed out, we’ve discovered that everything the Founders bequeathed us in that Constitution, the tools they so carefully weaved through its fabric to protect us from demagogues and tyrants, don’t work.

This, I think, is what causes me the most disorienting grief. The Constitution was the most significant and systematic effort ever undertaken to design a political system that would be proof against human nature. The whole purpose of it—the whole purpose of America—was to prevent men like Trump from coming to power.

George Washington marveled at the Convention’s success. “We are not to expect perfection in this world,” he proudly said to Lafayette, “but mankind, in modern times, have apparently made some progress in the science of government.” He was uncynical and optimistic in the way only a man of the eighteenth century could be. They had the Enlightenment on their side, reason and John Locke, science and progress. It might work.

I suppose that even if the whole thing fails now, it was a hell of a run. We did make progress. You can’t dismiss the whole idea because of one decade of madness, can you? Though I recall someone saying to me that she refused to think of her marriage as a failure because it ended in divorce. “If getting divorced doesn’t convince you your marriage has failed,” I thought, “we’re not using these words the same way.”

But this is an academic point. What would it mean, practically, if the American experiment were shown to fail? If we couldn’t make it work, how likely is it that anyone can? We’ve had the greatest imaginable natural blessings: a vast continent protected by even vaster oceans, warm-water ports, endless coastlines, fresh water, a temperate climate, an almost embarrassing abundance of fertile soil and rivers for transport. Is there anything for which we’ve lacked? We have oil, even.

We’ve had astonishing good luck, too. How often do the rivals of fledgling democracies magically destroy themselves? Not often, in history, but our rivals just keep doing it. Not only do they routinely commit suicide, they send us their greatest intellects and their most talented entrepreneurs in the process. We became the world’s most powerful nation, masters of its seas and skies, before we celebrated our bicentennial. If we couldn’t manage to keep our Republic, how do you like Lesotho’s odds?

I doubt the human race will get another chance like ours. There are no new continents. Perhaps we’ll pull ourselves together and try again, but Europeans spent a thousand years trying to recreate the Roman Empire; every time, they failed. Great nations and empires, like great love affairs—or maybe just like eggs—are easier to destroy than to put back together.

And if we fail, why would they even try? If we screw this up, it will be an awfully long time before another collection of bright young sparks says, “Let’s try conceiving a nation in liberty and dedicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Someone else will pipe up: “That’s a thought, but look what happened to the poor Americans. Maybe we should try socialism with Chinese characteristics. The Chinese have been around since forever.”

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It’s odd that I can still be shocked to the point of disbelief to wake up in the Trump era and that I can forget that it wasn’t always this way. I write something almost every day (or did, back before I lost my clever), so I have a good record of what I was thinking eight years ago, unclouded by any trick of the memory.

I wrote this:

Discovering that many things you believed about your country and its social and political life are false is as bewildering as (I would imagine) discovering that you were adopted. Until this year, I would have said the rise to power in America of a figure like Donald Trump was impossible, that such a scenario existed only in overheated Leftist imaginations. If you had told me the GOP would in my lifetime become a ethno-nationalist party, I would have dismissed you as uninformed—someone who didn’t even have the feel for the place you’d acquire from watching American television. I was sure of this. I thought I knew my country and its culture like my own face.

But Trump’s rise as a serious contender for the American presidency has made a fool of me. This in itself is no tragedy; the world does not depend upon my amour-propre. The tragedy is that the world does depend upon a stable, sane, and powerful America.

We can’t know yet whether Trump will be elected or what he will do in office, but he has already done terrible and global damage. He has, just to start, proven the GOP to be unprincipled, bigoted, provincial, and authoritarian, just as the Left always claimed. He has shattered the world’s confidence that the United States is a stable liberal democracy that may be trusted to protect the global commons and uphold its treaty commitments. And because the normative principles of liberal democracy have no life of their own beyond the states that advocate them, Trump has undermined liberal democracy itself.

The vacuum left by the global loss of confidence in democracy will be filled, of course, most likely by our illiberal rivals—China, Russia, and Iran—and by Islamists who don’t just reject democracy but the Westphalian state system itself.

But how can anyone argue that Americans must lead and defend the postwar global order against these threats when its voters have backed a candidate who is unaware that the United States possesses a nuclear triad? One whose spokeswoman, when asked about this deficit in the candidate’s knowledge, replied, “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you're afraid to use it?” Never in modern times has a man remotely so uninformed and irresponsible come this close to the White House. Not even during the Great Depression did America succumb to such a figure.

… Last night, I met another American expatriate in Paris, a political scientist, for a drink.³ Over the summer, he was arguing that Donald Trump could not be elected, given the exigencies of the American electoral college. He almost succeeded in reassuring me. “The bottom line,” he concluded confidently, “there is no way—not a snowball’s chance in hell—that the American electorate will send a man to the White House who is manifestly mentally ill.”

Now he is less confident. In the past week a series of literal and figurative stumbles have reduced Hillary Clinton’s strong lead over Trump in key states. One poll shows Trump ahead by five points in Ohio. Nate Silver now puts Trump’s odds of winning at roughly one in three. “Do you realize,” said my friend, astounded, “That no one will ever take the United States seriously again?

By this he meant that if Trump wins, America’s reputation in the world will be definitively shattered. No one will be able to take America seriously as a model, as a nation that leads the free world and espouses universal values. America would likely come to be viewed as a potentially dangerous country, if not a rogue state.

I wish I could disagree. But Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has already made the United States globally ridiculous, and, because no country as powerful as the United States can be purely ridiculous, frightening. His nomination effectively declares to the world that a significant number of Americans no longer believe in liberal democracy, still less in America’s role or its dignity.

It’s impossible decisively to predict what Trump would do in office because his proposals are often literally incoherent, this in the sense that they don’t obey the rules of English syntax. When they are not, they are contradictory: Trump can reverse himself entirely in the course of a single speech. When they are consistent, they are absurd and terrifying. He declares repeatedly, for example, that America should “take the oil” in Iraq. Last week, when pressed about how he would achieve this, he said the United States would have to “leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil. … You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: Take the oil.” In one recent speech, he moved from “Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Don’t let somebody else get it!” to denouncing President Obama for making a speech that “described America as arrogant, dismissive, derisive, and a colonial power.”

To believe Trump is anything but an outright lunatic, one must subscribe to the theory that he is some kind of secret genius. Some Americans do believe this. It is denial, or wishful thinking. By far the most obvious interpretation of Trump is that he is exactly what he seems—a stupid, mad, impulsive, and bellowing buffoon who has surrounded himself with opportunists, conspiracy-mongers, crackpots, and stooges for Vladimir Putin. …

“It’s fucking terrifying,” said my friend as we walked in the rain toward the Métro. “The world would never respect anything America says again.”

What I’d forgotten—what stands out now—is that eight years ago, I and other Americans took it for granted that the world did respect the things we said. Not anymore. It came to pass: The world will never respect anything America says again. It will fear us, yes. We’re still very powerful. Respect us? We don’t even respect ourselves.

There was much that neither Arun nor I had the imagination to see coming. Everything we didn’t imagine represents innocence lost. Neither of us, for example, imagined how quickly and completely the GOP would abandon everything it claimed to stand for, including the Constitution.

I couldn’t conceive of the hideous sight of American adults at the highest level of our government collapsing into subservient ignominy and positively tripping over one another to prostrate, truckle, and humiliate themselves before a man who thinks the Continental Army “manned the air and took over the airports.” (Rammed the ramparts, too.) Americans would never do that, I thought. It was not in our DNA. We did not bow and scrape.

As it happens, I could imagine what he would be like in office. I could see plainly what he was. But I couldn’t imagine the entire Republican Party not only going along with it but contorting themselves into grotesque carnival freaks in their competition to justify his every outrage.

Had you told me he would try to stay in power despite losing an election, that he would summon a mob to storm the Capitol and try to murder his vice-president in the full view of the entire world, I would have said, “Yep. Sounds right.” I would have believed he’d be impeached, and charged with committing God-knows-how many felonies. I figured he’d be worse than useless in a national emergency, too. If you’d told me he’d steal the Crown Jewels of our intelligence and leave them in his gold-plated crapper, I’d have said, “He’ll probably sell them to the highest bidder, actually.”

But had you told me the GOP would refuse to convict him even after he tried to stage a coup, that they would defend this, shouting until they were hoarse that the Emperor was not only wearing clothes but wearing the greatest, the silkiest, the most beautiful sateen robes in the history of the whole universe, that the Supreme Court would not only hear his case that the President is above the law but agree, that a federal judge would refuse to try him for his crimes, no matter how egregious, and invent legal theories to justify her corruption so contemptibly stupid as to make me long for the cool, analytic legal reasoning of a Turkish show trial? That, I wouldn’t have believed.

Had you told me that everyone but Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney would just go along with this—and above all, that the GOP would then nominate him again—and again—and in 2024, he might very well win? I would have said, “That’s delirious. This nightmare is bad enough as it is without postulating an invasion by the Body Snatchers.”

I had no idea that they were all, every one of them, hollow as a calabash. I lacked the imagination to see how quickly and completely someone like him would suck out our souls.

Even the cynical principle that people can be relied upon to act in their own self-interest failed me. I would never have guessed that one after another Republican would immolate himself in the furnace of Trump’s madness, go to prison for him, behave in ways they knew would make their own children and grandchildren ashamed to carry their names—and why? For him? I never imagined that after all this, Americans would go back for more.

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The generation of Americans who are about to enter college (without ever having read a book) has never known, even for a minute, what it was like to believe that there are some things we just don’t do because we sure didn’t fight a war of independence from the British only to wind up slobbering over some fat dementing psychopath who can’t stop farting in public. They will soon be adults, and those of us who remember will be irrelevant. The Trump years will be their idea of normal.

To be transformed from someone simply could not believe these things of her country into someone who believes it all too well is deeply sad. It is even sadder because the country is the United States of America. My grandparents knew what it was like to watch the country to which they had given their entire hearts go mad. But they believed it could never happen in America. At least, I think they did. I never asked them, for the same reason I never asked when they reckoned the last scene of Planet of the Apes would come true.

And no, Trump isn’t Hitler. But we’re just as crazy as the Germans who elected him. We’re taking a risk no sane country would take. There’s a coin-flip’s chance that we’ll be the miserable, cursed generation that destroys the last best hope of man on earth.

What can I really say about that?

Note: This is a corrected version of the original newsletter.

1. He’s also the only writer I know who’s given due thought to what it means that even our elites, perhaps especially our elites, are no longer literate. It’s not a coincidence that right by the article that says, “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is” is another one titled, “The elite college students who can’t read books.”

2. But we’re not precisely caught in the horns of a dilemma, because there’s a third possibility: He may be so demented by the time he’s inaugurated, or soon thereafter, that he can’t even be propped up. Is President Vance a better outcome than President Trump? Vance is far more intelligent and competent, and he’ll be far more successful at anything he chooses to do. If he decides to pursue Trump’s wicked agenda, there’s no hope he’ll just forget about it, distracted by a burger and another showing of Sunset Boulevard. On the other hand, much though I dislike Vance’s character, I’ve seen no evidence that he’s suffering from a Cluster B personality disorder. So there’s that.

3. Long-time readers might guess that the friend was Arun Kapil, and they would be right.