The Weekly Sift

For five years or so now, we’ve been looking at Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, and recognizing that something truly abnormal was going on. In an ordinary candidacy or an ordinary administration, this wouldn’t be happening. There’s a whole genre of what-would-a-typical-administration-be-doing-now articles, to which I have contributed my share.

Well, I can’t help myself, I’m doing it again. This week I have to call attention to the fact that nearly three weeks after an election, nearly all our attention is focused on the loser rather than the winner. That’s really weird.

In an ordinary administration, we’d still be talking about the outgoing president a little, but mainly about how he’ll ride off into the sunset. What’s his legacy? How will history judge him? Where will his presidential library get built?

Instead, Biden’s cabinet announcements are barely causing a ripple while we focus on Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power in spite of the voters and at the cost of American democracy. In some sense we should be focused on that, because it’s horrible and really unusual, and we need to make sure it doesn’t work.

But there’s also something else at play, and that’s what I’ll be discussing in the featured post: The whole country is coming out of a dysfunctional and even abusive relationship with Donald Trump. One defining trait of such relationships is their intensity. Even after you escape, your attention keeps being drawn back, because normal life seems so flat by comparison.

So Biden is out there being nice to people and talking about healing. He’s appointing doctors and public health experts to his Covid-fighting team rather than charlatans, and talking about sensible things like masks and hygiene rather than quack cures. His foreign-policy team is made up of, well, foreign-policy people. He’s about to appoint a treasury secretary, and all the names being thrown around are folks who know something about money and finance.

How dull. If I talk about that kind of stuff, who’s going to share my post? How do I get my own adrenaline pumping? What is there to be outraged about? Where’s the threat to our whole way of life?

Intensity is addictive. Even when the intense experience was unpleasant, people tend to get drawn back towards it. Abused spouses often give their abusers a second chance. Ex-members of cults get drawn back in.

So the point of the featured post is that the place for America’s healing to start is with me, and maybe with you. We need to get over Trump. We need to prepare ourselves to once again have a healthy relationship with the news and with the government.

I still have some work to do on that post, so let’s predict it to appear around 11 EST.

The weekly summary covers both the antics of the outgoing clown and the new President’s attempt to assemble a government. Meanwhile, the long-predicted fall surge in the virus is here and is setting records. A big chunk of the population is still in denial about it and treating public health measures like some kind of oppression that they need to resist. So the post-Thanksgiving period is set up to be apocalyptic.

Dark humor seems especially cathartic to me right now, so I’ll discuss Covid carols, including one I wrote myself. And I’ll close with a funny video making mask removal a kind of strip tease.

This week I was optimistic and then terrified and then sort of relieved.

In the end, this election has been like a Christmas movie where Santa is eventually rescued, but he’s still not bringing me the pony I wanted: Trump will leave office, so the triumph of fascism will at least be delayed for another four years. At the same time, without the Senate, Democrats will not be able to fix the structural problems in American democracy. So the GOP’s minority-rule strategy looks viable for at least another two years. With McConnell blocking everything for the foreseeable future, more Americans will lose faith in the viability of government in general and our democratic system in particular.

In this week’s featured post, I urge everyone to appreciate just how strange and unexpected this week’s results have been. They don’t fit anybody’s theory, so we should all resist the urge to just repeat the points we were making in the spring. That post is called “Sitting With the Weirdness”, and I hope to get it out by 10 EST.

The weekly summary will also have election discussion, but also covers the alarming jump in Covid cases this week, and a few other stories that might have slipped under your radar. That should be out by 1.

For months, I’ve been resisting (more successfully some weeks than others) the urge to focus entirely on the election. I’ve especially tried not to get lost in speculating about who’s going to win, because that’s a black hole that can suck down all your brain cycles without leading to any productive action.

But now voting is well underway. This year, Election Day marks the end of the voting season, and that’s a week from tomorrow. More than a third of the expected electorate has already voted. I dropped my own ballot off at the local court house a few days ago. I feel like I’ve crossed the event horizon — not thinking about the outcome is not an option any more.

But it’s a real challenge to think about it sanely. 2016 was the kind of nightmare you don’t soon recover from. Hillary was supposed to have it in the bag, and then everything went wrong. I didn’t even entertain the thought that she might lose until about 6 in the evening, when I heard over the radio that black turnout in Cleveland was unexpectedly light.

Time hasn’t eased those wounds, because Trump pokes at them every day. The last four years have been every bit as bad as we feared, and then some. Even Bill Barr isn’t corrupt enough or subservient enough for him now. Another four years of this and we’ll have a true autocracy that he can hand off to Don Jr. or Jared or Ivanka.

So it’s hard to feel sanguine no matter how good the signs look. But all the same, they do look good. That’s what I’ll talk about in the featured post “I Want To Believe”. That should be out around 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary I’ll also cover the virus, which has surged to a new peak in daily new cases. Unlike the spring and summer surges, this fall surge is just about everywhere: all sections of the country, urban and rural alike. The Northeast is probably the safest region right now, because we got the crap scared out of us in the spring and so we’re following the guidelines better than most other places. But cases are ramping up here too.

But I’ll also tempt fate a little and start thinking about what we need to fix after Trump is gone. Even if we dodge this bullet, his administration has stress-tested our democracy and exposed a lot of flaws. (I expect this to become a major theme of the Sift after the election is safely over.) I’ll talk some about the media and the environment (which needs a lot more attention in future weeks).

Also: what’s wrong with originalism, the all-electric Hummer, hacking Trump’s Twitter, and what can happen to a Twinkie if you leave in the basement for eight years. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

Just when you think you know what you need to cover, something else happens. This week the Sift was going to be about Trump’s taxes and that horrible debate, and maybe a brief discussion of undecided voters — and then Friday morning I wake up to find that Trump has tested positive for Covid-19.

That development has so many angles that it outgrew the weekly summary and became its own article. So “Schadenfreude, and seven other reactions to Trump’s illness” should be out soon. I’m still going to try to write about the implications of what the NYT has revealed about Trump’s taxes, which I hope to post around 11 EDT. That puts the weekly summary off to around 1.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of 2020, it hits us with something else. Friday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, sparking yet another Supreme Court nomination battle and threatening to cement Trump’s legal legacy with a 6-3 conservative majority.

At moments like this, it’s tempting to indulge in speculation: What will Trump and McConnell do? What tactics can the Democrats use? How will the battle affect the presidential election or the various Senate races? I can’t totally resist that urge myself, but I recognize it as mostly a waste of effort: We’ll know soon enough, and whether we have speculated right or wrong probably won’t help us respond.

What I want to do instead this morning is use the Court as an example of a larger point: We are living under a system of minority rule. Because of the Electoral College, we elected a president with only 46% of the vote, in spite of another candidate getting 48%. The institutional structure of the Senate, meanwhile, inflates the value of rural conservative votes, so that Mitch McConnell can be “majority” leader, in spite of the fact that his senators represent a minority of the nation’s population.

Because the House plays no role in choosing federal judges, McConnell and Trump are able to pack the judicial branch with conservatives who not only are out of step with a majority of the country, but who in turn reinforce minority rule by refusing to protect voting rights.

I’ll flesh that argument out, with a little quantitative help from Nate Silver, in this week’s featured post “The Illegitimacy of a Conservative Supreme Court”. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will mourn Justice Ginsburg, indulge in some speculation about what happens next, and try to at least touch the bases on the week’s other major stories. That should be out by 1.