Today's must read is George Packer's searing article in The Atlantic, in which he methodically and brilliantly examines sinister demagogue and attempted destroyer of democracy Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump's true legacy. He notes that under Trump, America has become "less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader":
"[Trump] leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
But we now have the chance, because two events in Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth. The first was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of thousands of Americans died, many of them needlessly, and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed.
The second event came on November 3. For months Trump had tried frantically to destroy Americans’ trust in the election—the essence of the democratic system, the one lever of power that belongs undeniably to the people. His effort consisted of nonstop lies about the fraudulence of mail-in ballots. But the ballots flooded into election offices, and people lined up before dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of them waited 10 hours to vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the soaring threat of the virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast ballots—the highest turnout rate since at least 1900. The defeated president tried again to soil our faith, by taking away our votes. The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump." (our emphasis)
Not to overstate it, but Packer's article should be a guide for any true history of these last four years of Trump's and his allies' attempt to replace our democratic institutions with corrupt authoritarianism and cult leader worship. The damage he'll try to do in the next few weeks springs from his deep psychiatric disorder. There's no question that he'll hover around after January 20, a disturbing presence throwing hand grenades at the Biden-Harris Administration, even if from prison if justice is served.
