ILOVE$TRUMP

The urgent uncertainty of it all may be a reason why, in recent weeks, Trump has summoned forth some of the most incendiary rhetoric ever employed by an American presidential candidate. He has called for the execution of the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He now urges police to shoot shoplifters. He has begun characterizing his political adversaries as subhuman “vermin” who must be “rooted out.” Parroting the Third Reich while claiming (no doubt truthfully, in this case) that he has never read “Mein Kampf,” Trump has declared that immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia “poison the blood” of the United States.And yet Trump is cruising to a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, and many national polls show him beating Joe Biden in November. With ominous foreboding, the entire January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine was dedicated to one momentous question: “What if Trump wins?” Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, characterizes Trump as an “antidemocratic demagogue,” one “completely devoid of decency.” If Trump wins again, warns Mark Leibovich, author of “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” (2022), then we Americans will need to let go of the soothing notion that “this is not who we are.