Midterm Time Capsule, 35 Days to Go.
1850s image of the ruined Temple of Ramesses the Great, subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias: “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains.” We’re nearing this stage in US politics. (Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images, via Getty.)
Ten years ago, on The Atlantic’s site, I ran a “Trump Time Capsule” series, chronicling ways in which then-candidate Donald Trump was blasting through the bounds that had constrained “serious” potential presidents through our history.
For instance, here was #150 in that series, after James Comey blustered into the middle of the Trump-Hillary Clinton race, with his “but her emails!” announcement shortly before election day.
Two years after that, I did a similar, shorter “Midterm Time Capsule,” for the 2018 elections. It included items like this one, about how the newly confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh was likely to change the balance of the Supreme Court.1 Here’s how the Kavanaugh/Trump situation looked to me way back then:
Brett Kavanaugh’s impending arrival on the Supreme Court is like Donald Trump’s attainment of the presidency, in this important way:
By the rules of politics that prevailed until 2016, neither of them would have come close to consideration for their respective offices. For Trump, the reasons are obvious. For Kavanaugh, they’re brilliantly summarized by one of Kavanaugh’s long-term friends here.
Thus the ascent of a man like Kavanaugh necessarily changes the public sense of what is within bounds, and not, for the most powerful jurists in the nation—just as the ascent of Trump has changed assessments of what is within bounds for a president, and how much protection long-standing norms can supply.
There’s a lot more in that vein, which I’m sad to say stands up pretty well over these years. As a gentle reminder to the voters of Maine: Your own Susan Collins, after expressing “concern” about the Kavanaugh nomination, was the crucial vote to put him on the Court, after hearing his reassurance that he considered Roe v. Wade “settled law.”
We come now to another consequential election. My plan for the weeks ahead is again to provide some real-time markers and commentary, from behind the veil of uncertainty about how things will look weeks or years from now.
I’ll start this time with a brief checklist of events during the past seven days that, each on its own, might be the subject of full academic treatises at other times in our history. (And perhaps might do so, years from now.) Then a slightly more detailed discussion of a few other aspects of “public knowledge” at this moment.
The checklist:
Donald Trump’s vulgar address to the United Nations last week, in which he threatened to “annihilate” another UN member state and “drive them into hell,” was bad in the way all his formal addresses are bad. That is, he haltingly read, word-by-word and sing-song style, the parts of the speech that were officially “written.” Then every few lines he sought the comfort of rally-style riffs that made the speech run twice its allotted time (36+ minutes, vs 15) and whose lexicon was drawn only from his shrunken current vocabulary. Eg, that America had been “dead,” but now it is “the hottest country.” Etc.2
The difference between this speech and Trump’s other apocalyptic pronouncements is that this time no one cared. The world has learned to take Trump neither seriously nor literally. He can do a lot of damage on the way down, but everyone sees him deflating.Trump went from the UN to his predictably humiliating “summit” with Xi Jinping, in Washington. The US got nothing that mattered, and the Chinese got the only thing that counted on their side—namely time, to let the US keep blowing itself up and for Xi to deal with his domestic economic struggles.
Trump’s plainly illegal barring of three news outlets from the White House press room had several welcome side-effects. First, it backfired on Trump, in denying him the airtime that keeps him alive. Second, it evoked some solidarity among the White House press corps, as other networks temporarily declined to use photos or sound from “pool” coverage. Third, it brought yet another quick rebuke from the federal judiciary. And, finally, it revived at least briefly the age-old discussion about ways of covering the government that don’t involve sitting in the White House press room.
The long-awaited signs of Republicans who are facing the voters and realize that lockstep loyalty to Trump—and Trump’s war, Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s diesel, Trump’s ballroom, Trump’s corruption—has become an electoral minus rather than a plus. Trump feels energized telling the base that they should imagine he’s on every ballot. Good for him! Bad for his party.
And there’s more. But for now, here is a slightly more detailed look at three more time-capsule items, all concerning the realm of public information with five weeks to go.
1) Furries in the skies.
A week ago I wrote that Tommy Tuberville—incumbent US Senator from Alabama, apparent resident of Florida, current candidate for governor of Alabama, and “Coach” in all his ads—was “among the dimmest” members of the Senate.
It is time to strike “among.” (Although Eric Schmitt of Missouri has just entered the running.) Last week Tuberville gave a speech on the Senate floor that I assumed must be Onion-style parody when I saw it. You can read a crucial passage below (or in the Congressional Record here). The gist was Coach’s claim that air travel was endangered by pilots, controllers, and crew who were part of “the furry community”—people with cosplaying, animal-oriented proclivities.
Lord help us indeed. This is asinine on its face. But Coach didn’t know when to stop digging. When the craziness of his claim was pointed out, Coach offered “proof”: Recordings of pilots making animal noises during transmissions “on guard”—that is, on the 121.5 radio frequency usually set aside for emergency calls.
Why is this stupid? It’s like hearing kids at a swimming pool yelling “Marco”/ “Polo” and thinking an explorer from the 1300s was about to appear. Among a few non-serious pilots, an asinine habit of making animal noises on the radio has emerged, mainly meow or sometimes barks. This is teenaged-boy behavior, in the skies. You won’t hear meow on recordings of any airline transmission. More detail here.
A pilot who does this is a loser—even though he (I’ve never heard a female pilot meowing) is not creating flight risks, whatever Coach believes. A public figure who takes the “furry menace” seriously is a loser, whatever happens five weeks from now at the polls.
2) ‘Nothing beside remains’ at the WaPo.
The Trump-era saga of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post is long and sad. But until recently the effects of his destructive handiwork had been seen mainly on the paper’s editorial page, and in the ghost towns of its once-celebrated sports and books section, its international bureaus, and its local news. Day by day, its remaining national-news, business, and political reporters kept breaking worthwhile stories.