Reflections and forebodings

They say there is a debate between Trump and Biden tonight. I won't be watching. I'll be on the phones, as I am every evening, encouraging Biden supporters to get out there and vote.

As we come in for a landing in this ever-so-strange and vital election, I thought I'd share some smart commentary, looking backwards first.

Here's Joshua Marshall, reminding us of the first days of the Trump regime and how far we've come:

... In the very early days of the administration, during the round of public protests around the travel ban, David Kurtz said to me that he thought some of the people in our operation were still thinking that somehow the whole thing wouldn’t hold, that they weren’t quite accepting that this was going to go on for years. The early weeks were so chaotic that this wasn’t a crazy thing to think. I can’t say I was sure myself what would happen. It did seem like the whole thing was so jagged and chaotic, so much of the nascent presidency’s wrongdoing was so rapidly catching up to it that it wasn’t clear it wouldn’t all fall apart. ...

... it is also hard to quite remember the nature of that early chaos. Today Trump appears to be publicly decompensating. Yesterday he managed to attack his Attorney General as a softie who hadn’t yet arrested Joe Biden, which other appointees would have. He called Biden a “criminal”. He called one of the most buttoned-up members of the White House press corps a “criminal”. His Director of National Intelligence leapt into his role as campaign surrogate, insisting there was no Russian hacking behind the purported Hunter Biden emails. It is hard to think of a time in the last four years when Trump has appeared more unhinged, free from any restraint or driven by his consuming rages.

But there’s a difference. The sad truth is that we’ve gotten used to this – the casual law-breaking and bad acts, the aping of foreign strongman antics, the lies that come as easy as water flowing down a hill. It all seems normal now. In January 2017 it not only didn’t seem normal it seemed hard to see how it could be sustainable. Something had to give. Or at least it seemed so. And it did. We did.

Here's Paul Waldman, looking ahead at what will happen to the Republican Party if we do, indeed, evict the Donald. 

We’re already seeing violence and lunacy emerging from the deranged and deluded on the right. The GOP is still in charge, and Democratic governors are the target of kidnapping plots while half of all Republicans think top Democrats are involved in an international pedophile ring. Can you imagine what it will be like when Democrats are the ones holding power?

It’s probably an exaggeration to say we’re headed for a civil war, but there can be little doubt that it will be as ugly as anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. And Republicans will be doing everything they can to make it worse, every step of the way.

Sad -- and likely true. It's up to us to envision and seize a better future.