REPRISE

Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.

UNCHECKED, UNBALANCED

Eight years ago on Election Night, as the returns came in from North Carolina, where I was reporting, I made a panicked phone call to a friend. I told him that I feared the country was sliding into the hands of a demi-fascist, and that it might even be time to start considering an exit plan. My life, like those of many Black people of my generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as my parents’ lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to uproot it. The prospect that a Presidential candidate could be embraced not only by white supremacists but also by one of the two major political parties and almost half the electorate triggered an enduring dread that the progress we had made was fragile and impermanent—and that, with the right incentives, the old order could resurrect itself in the present.

By the end of that late-night phone call, though, we had sorted through the “guardrails” theory of the various checks and precedents that would constrain Donald Trump. The advantage of the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal government is that it takes a brilliant level of orchestra-conducting to achieve anything significant—a skill set that a mercurial, chronically uninformed career real-estate developer did not likely possess. It was to be presumed that the Republican establishment, craven and increasingly reactionary but on the whole more sound than its presumptive leader, would curb Trump’s impulses, or at least dangle enough distractions in front of him to keep him from focussing for too long on any truly destructive goal. The press and the courts would be the redoubt of democracy; they were designed precisely for such a moment.