Mark Krotov at n+1:
Hadn’t it been dimming for years? Last weekend the Atlantic ran a juicy piece about the chaos and despair inside the Trump campaign. It should have reminded me more than it did at the time of the hundreds of similar articles published during his first term and during the 2024 campaign. He’s really cracking up this time, he’s lashing out at everyone in his orbit, he’s lost the thread. And then his defeat in 2020, his exile and prosecution after January 6, his increasing incoherence and paranoia, flagged even by his former staff. (“Once Top Advisers to Trump, They Now Call Him ‘Liar,’ ‘Fascist,’ and ‘Unfit’” went the title of the Times’s collection of interviews with the likes of John Kelly, James Mattis, and Mike Pence.) The pattern is so clear in retrospect: these cycles of marginalization and humiliation would have defeated anyone else, but Trump—through some combination of unprecedented luck and intuitive political genius—kept reemerging, impossible to count out no matter how outré the misdeed. Yesterday was a triumph greater than 2016. It wasn’t a fluke. Trump is America’s choice.
more here.
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