On a sweltering summer night in Cleveland 10 years ago, I witnessed Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention — the “I alone can fix it” speech — and realized for the first time that he was likely to be elected president. Like many people in this business, I have too much ego invested in not being surprised by anything that happens, no matter how dire or ridiculous. But that was without a doubt one of the most traumatic experiences of my career: As I wrote at the time, it hit 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale.
I also began to understand Trump’s rise as something more than an aberration or a flukish detour from the normal back and forth of regular-order democracy. (It has taken the Democratic Party until approximately right now to figure that out, if it has.) It was more like a dark epiphany, a moment of revelation in which unsavory but unavoidable truths about America were laid bare before America itself and the wider world. It might be the most American thing ever that we needed to experience the epiphany twice — with equal doses of tragedy and farce on both occasions — before we began to grasp its message.
