Atlantic October problem: Trump’s antidemocratic actions

For its October 2024 problem, The Atlantic seems to be to the presidential election with a package deal of tales––and a placing cowl illustration––inspecting Donald Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies. Articles cowl the Republican politicians who bent simply to Trump’s will, and the threats {that a} second Trump time period poses, with reporting by Tim Alberta, Anne Applebaum, Mark Leibovich, Helen Lewis, Elaina Plott Calabro, Hanna Rosin, and Sarah Zhang. Tales are publishing this week and subsequent; please attain out with any questions or requests to interview The Atlantic’s writers on their reporting.

On the duvet: The illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visible language of outdated Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to painting a circus wagon on its ominous strategy to a defiled Capitol. One thing Depraved This Method Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a specific inspiration. We consider this to be the primary cowl bearing no headline or typography in The Atlantic’s 167-year historical past.

Main the package deal, and on-line in the present day, is Mark Leibovich’s “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.” Again in 2015, when Trump first sought the Republican Occasion’s nomination, he boasted to Leibovich that he would simply bend Republicans to his will. “They could converse badly about me now, however they gained’t later,” Trump mentioned. However politicians have been weak, Trump mentioned, not like the “brutal, vicious killers” he handled within the enterprise world—they have been pathetic “puppets” who, Trump mentioned, would undergo him. “It will likely be very straightforward,” Trump mentioned.

To Leibovich and nearly anybody who’d hung out round politics, this gave the impression of empty bombast. However Trump turned out to be proper. He “rolled over” his Republican rivals, gleefully humiliating them alongside the best way. When he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, occasion elders reminiscent of Mitch McConnell assured people who Republican establishments have been robust sufficient to resist Trump. “He’s not going to vary the fundamental philosophy of the occasion,” McConnell mentioned. On reflection, this was hilarious.

Republican leaders know full effectively who Trump is; in spite of everything, most of them condemned him fulsomely. But in the present day, even after he misplaced the presidency in 2020, Trump dominates the GOP and has remade it in his picture. His household controls the occasion equipment. Regardless of realizing higher, Republican politicians––together with many who as soon as mentioned that Trump would destroy the occasion––march in lockstep obeisance to him, kissing his ring and even imitating his sartorial fashion. “If Trump had a mustache,” Leibovich writes, “his acolytes would all develop and groom one identical to his—as Baath occasion loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.”

The occasion’s prostration earlier than Trump is complete; the hole between what the GOP traditionally espoused and what it now permits itself to abide is large. A once-serious occasion has been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of no matter its convictions as soon as have been. And all of this, Leibovich wonders, to what finish

Already revealed: Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Kash Patel, “The Man Who Will Do Something for Trump,” seems to be into Patel’s distinctive devotion to Trump throughout his presidency, and the way Patel is the kind of individual Trump is more likely to flip to in a second time period.

The difficulty continues The Atlantic’s essential reporting on the 2024 election, which incorporates the “If Trump Wins” cowl package deal for the January/February 2024 problem. “If Trump Wins” featured essays by two dozen Atlantic writers on the results of a potential second Trump presidency, and was not too long ago translated into Spanish.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
[email protected]