Who is steering the American ship of state?This isn’t a philosophical question; we’ve spent four years wondering about the roots and motivations of Trumpism. It’s a specific question: Who is in charge right now when the White House has to make a decision?On paper, the answer is simple: Until noon on January 20, Donald Trump is the president. Then Joe Biden will be sworn in and become president. In practice, matters are less clear.
History is rewritten by the self-styled victims.Even after more than four years of rationalizing and excusing every violation by the president, Donald Trump’s enablers have their work cut out for them this week, after a mob incited by Trump sacked the U.S. Capitol, disrupted constitutional order, and killed a police officer. But, undeterred, they are still energetically devoted to the task.
Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different. Maybe someone already has.This has been a leitmotif of the Trump administration: Donald Trump does something outrageous and inappropriate, maybe even illegal. Immediately, there are horrified reactions from across the political spectrum, but pretty quickly, the anger fades.
During an election-eve rally in Dalton, Georgia, Monday night, President Donald Trump offered a wide range of lies, conspiracy theories, and hogwash, but he also said one thing that was unimpeachably true.“I don’t do rallies for other people,” he said. “I do rallies for me.”Ostensibly, Trump was in Georgia to campaign for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two Republicans running to keep their seats in a runoff on Tuesday.
If your memory can reach back to the time before COVID-19—no shame if it can’t—you may recall the last big story before the pandemic struck: the impeachment of President Donald Trump.In December 2019, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, all stemming from a ploy in which he attempted to extort the Ukrainian government into assisting his reelection campaign.
As he accepted the Republican nomination for president in summer 2016, Donald Trump promised, “We will make America safe again.”“The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its citizens,” he said. “Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.
In the next few days, President Donald Trump will have to make a decision about what to do with the National Defense Authorization Act. It’s a clunky name for a straightforward bill—it dictates how the military budget is spent—and it used to be what was known as “must-pass” legislation, because no Congress would dare fail to fund the troops, and no president would dare veto it.
In most ways, it would be hard to find two men much more different than Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr: One is a slow-drawling anti-immigration fanatic from Alabama; the other is a dry, intellectually engaged bagpiper from New York. One spent his career on the fringes of conservatism before a sudden late-career elevation to the Cabinet; the other is a consummate establishment figure who led the Justice Department twice, three decades apart.
When Donald Trump was granted a coat of arms for his Scottish golf courses in 2012 (after a lengthy court battle, of course), he chose as its motto “Numquam concedere”: Never concede. He has not, even as it has become clear that he lost the presidential election by a wide margin.In the first few weeks after the election, anonymous Republicans and White House officials insisted that Trump’s lack of a concession was no reason for alarm.
“When can we stop thinking about Trump every minute?” the New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens asked yesterday. As usual with such queries, the correct answer is “What do you mean ‘we’?” To a remarkable degree, people have already stopped paying attention to the 45th president.
By 1979, Elvis Costello had established himself as an acerbic songwriter with a penchant for pungent turns of phrase, a sort of New Wave Bob Dylan. Critics adored his wordplay, and audiences made his first two records big hits. But when Costello delivered his third album, in January of that year, it was a reproach to anyone who thought they had figured out his shtick. Armed Forces represented a leap for the English singer and his band, the Attractions—a harmonic and sonic transformation.
The good news is that President Donald Trump’s attempts to defy the results of the election and remain in office keep falling flat. In court after court, judges have ruled against the Trump campaign and tossed out its lawsuits. Today, Georgia certified Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the state’s presidential electors, after a federal judge yesterday rejected a prominent conservative lawyer’s suit seeking to block certification.
The waiting is over. Now comes … the waiting.The first stage of the presidential interregnum, from Tuesday night through Saturday, was the slow but inexorable march toward Joe Biden being declared the winner of the presidential race. No one knew quite when that would happen, but there was an objective end point: whenever enough votes were counted for the outcome to be clear.The second stage is stranger and more open-ended.
Donald Trump leaves the White House briefing room on November 5. (Carlos Barria / The Atlantic)“We’re going to win so much that you’re going to be sick and tired,” Donald Trump promised in 2016. Over the next four years, the American people did get sick (nearly 10 million of them so far from COVID-19), and they did get tired, and in the end they decided they’d had enough.
Updated at 2:36 a.m. ET on November 4, 2020.The 2020 election has been the most anticipated in generations—and for now the result of the contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will have to go on being anticipated a little longer.With most polls closed around the nation, it is clear that Democratic dreams of a quick and decisive Biden victory were just as much an illusion as the president’s hope for a clear-cut win.
When a president is running for a second term, elections tend to look like a contest between change (a new candidate) and more of the same (the incumbent).But 2020 doesn’t fit the mold. As aberrant as Donald Trump’s first term in office has been, a second term might be a more radical departure from the past four years than even a comparative return to normalcy under Joe Biden would be. In other words, this is a change election either way—the question is what kind of change.
When a “senior official” in the Trump administration published an op-ed in The New York Times in September 2018, detailing how he and others had worked to sabotage President Donald Trump, it seemed like an important moment for the emerging “resistance” movement.No longer was it only angry liberals, disaffected moms, and disillusioned old-school Republicans. Suddenly we had evidence of the resistance inside the very halls of power.
Donald Trump is trying to run his favorite play one more time: spreading unverified but salacious accusations, demanding that they be investigated, and then using the fact of the investigation to convince the public that something must be wrong. The biggest unanswered question of this election, with just 11 days to go, is whether he can pull it off one more time.
“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people,” President Donald Trump said during his inaugural address. “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”But in the final debate of his first term, Trump forgot them.
What is more shocking: the words or the images?The words are astonishing, to be sure.“I learned so much about coronavirus. One thing that’s for certain, don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment.
The whole point of Cal Cunningham was that he was supposed to be boring. The North Carolina Democrat is not the most dynamic campaigner, but polls have consistently given him a lead over the Republican incumbent, Thom Tillis, in the race for U.S. Senate.Now that lead is up in the air. On Thursday, a report revealed texts between Cunningham, a married father of two, and a Democratic strategist. The texts are less racy than, say, joggy; true to form for Cunningham, they’re rather dull.
Though it has thrown the nation into chaos, the fact that Donald Trump has contracted the coronavirus should not be especially surprising—after all, he has been careless about measures to control the virus, and protect his own health, for months. Nor should it come as a surprise that the White House is offering partial, misleading, and contradictory information. That has been a reliable theme of the Trump presidency.
Updated at 6:06 p.m. ET on October 2, 2020. It is a peculiar calm in the midst of the wild storm. Even as the nation descended into a frenzy over President Donald Trump’s positive coronavirus test, there was silence from the one reliable source of noise for the past five years: the president himself.At 12:54 this morning, Trump tweeted that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive.
Pity the poor closed-caption writers. Pity the poor ASL interpreters. But most of all, pity poor us, the American electorate.Tonight was the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, and if there is any sense or mercy left in this nation, it will be the last too. The event was a shambolic shout fest, with scarcely a single morsel of substance to be found.
When voters say they want politicians to run the government like a business, they should stipulate which business. Surely not the Trump Organization. A blockbuster New York Times report yesterday suggested that either the president’s real-estate empire is a boondoggle that’s losing millions of dollars a year, or it’s a massive tax-avoidance scheme. (Or perhaps it’s some of both.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of the The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump was asked about whether there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Trump replied—well, it was a bit hard to tell. Trump’s critics heard the president saying he wanted to throw out votes and wouldn’t relinquish power. His defenders conceded that he sounded stupid but simply meant that he intended to win.
On Sunday, Joe Biden made a personal appeal to Republican senators considering whether to hold a vote on President Donald Trump’s anticipated Supreme Court nominee, asking them to wait for the result of November’s election before filling the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s spot.“Please, follow your conscience,” Biden said. “Don’t go there. Uphold your constitutional duty, your conscience; let the people speak.
No matter how often he’s asked, Donald Trump can’t articulate what his second term as president would look like. He doesn’t need to, because Americans can see for themselves. It looks like Michael Caputo.Caputo is the top spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is a job in which you’re supposed to shape the news, not make it. But Caputo has had a busy few days.
It’s not hard to figure out what Donald Trump is up to at the moment: He’s making every effort to stir up racial tension and provoke violence after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. What’s harder to figure out is why.Today, Trump is traveling to Kenosha, over the objections and pleas of the governor and mayor (both Democrats), who say he will only make the situation worse, which is probably the goal anyway.
The shooting of Jacob Blake on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is at once freshly horrifying and achingly familiar, in the way that only a police shooting in the United States in 2020 can be.The Kenosha shooting has the dubious distinction of being the first high-profile shooting of a Black man by police since massive Black Lives Matter protests erupted earlier this summer, bringing with them enormous—but potentially ephemeral—shifts in public opinion.