“We are entering into an epistemological crisis,” Barack Obama recently told my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg.The crisis didn’t begin with the Trump presidency, but it rapidly accelerated over the course of its term—and the situation has, if anything, grown worse in the aftermath of the presidential election.According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t believe that the 2020 election was free and fair.
Lorenzo Meloni / MagnumIn the aftermath of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump, who has inflicted so much gratuitous harm on the United States—including making unfounded accusations of election fraud and declaring himself the victor, a malicious lie that is undermining the integrity of American democracy—there is an understandable temptation among those on the winning side to seek revenge and settle scores with Trump and Trumpworld.
“Truth will come to light,” Launcelot Gobbo tells his father in The Merchant of Venice. “At the length truth will out.”For Donald Trump, this past week is when, for all except his most beguiled and gullible supporters, the truth willed itself out. At the start of the week, the ground on which the president’s most fanatical followers stood started to crumble; by the end of the week, it had completely collapsed.
“I’m used to bullies.”That’s a line Joe Biden has used several times during his run against Donald Trump, and he said it again recently in talking about the first presidential debate.“I hope I don’t take the bait, because he’s going to say awful things about me, my family, et cetera,” Biden said at a virtual fundraiser.
Fifty-two years ago last Saturday, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after being declared the winner of the California presidential primary. He was 42 years old.I was too young to remember his death, but over the years I have become something of a Bobby Kennedy devotee. That might seem strange coming from a lifelong conservative who served in three Republican administrations.