The Tyrant Trap
Vanity Fair|November 2017

There is plenty of ugly fight left in Donald Trump’s presidency, which has already warped American culture. But it’s not too soon to contemplate a post-Trump challenge: tyrant-proofing the country, in case the next one isn’t such a clown

The Tyrant Trap

It is my dearly beloved hope (yours too, I trust) that it won’t take another presidential election to expel the Desecrator in Chief from the premises, to liberate us from the otiose spectacle of Donald Trump tramping over the Constitution in his golf spikes and exercising his tweeting thumbs at the expense of decency, democracy, and basic spelling (“Somtimes you need protest in order to heel, & we will heel, & be stronger than ever before!”). The frantic tempo of his cruel, petty fits of pique—the pardoning of the sadist sheriff Joe Arpaio, the transgender ban, the decision to end the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program simply to inflict pain and roll back any vestige of the Obama-stamped compassionate policy— and the Agatha Christie elimination of assistant warlocks such as Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Seb Gorka (could Stephen Miller be next on the skewer?) signal an administration heading toward a crescendo, not one buckling down for the duration and plotting new coordinates. It’s stuck in a dead man’s float.

This story is from the November 2017 edition of Vanity Fair.

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This story is from the November 2017 edition of Vanity Fair.

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