Deep Dark Truthful Mirror

If this was a test — and it was — we failed it. Bad.

The irony is, we were worried about Trump losing and trying to steal the election through various quasi-legal, parliamentary, and extrajudicial means including violence and the threat of violence. Instead, what happened was in its way far worse: A slim majority of the American people willingly handed him back the White House, in numbers that are resounding by contemporary standards.

Dobbs was supposed to galvanize American women into action, and yet it did not: Trump actually gainedwith white women. Insulting enormous swaths of the electorate didn’t matter either. (He also gained with Black voters, as he has done in each of his presidential runs, and with Hispanic voters especially, despite his regular racist invective and promise to deport some 11 million immigrants, which would devastate the entire country and that community especially.) Nor did staging a neo-Nazi rally, nor openly promising a dictatorship, nor being convicted of 34 felonies, nor trying to overthrow a free and fair election, nor being an adjudicated sex offender, nor behaving in the most rancid and vile way possible for any public figure let alone a candidate for president of the United States.

Once again, Adam Serwer’s observation from 2018 remains the lodestar of politics in the Trump era: all the things we think are horrible…