Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 killed as many as 100 million people over two years. It was one of the deadliest disasters in history, and the one all subsequent pandemics are now compared with.At the time, The Atlantic did not cover it.

The day after the 2016 election, I got a phone call from an old friend. Neither of us had slept much, and we spent most of the conversation exchanging shell-shocked comments of the Can you believe this? variety. Before we hung up, his voice took on a trace of irony. “Well,” he said, “this is going to be great for your career.”I waved the remark away, but I knew he was probably right. My contentious relationship with Donald Trump was already paying professional dividends.

The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five.

As a White House resident, President Donald Trump is a goner. But his stranglehold on the GOP seems as tight as ever: Three in four Republicans say they believe their man won the 2020 election. Can the GOP channel the energy of his most fervent supporters and advance a sort of Trumpism without Trump? The answer depends on what Trumpism is—a populist prototype, a personality cult, or something stranger.To some, Trumpism marks the beginning of a new Republican Party.