@trenthead

In another exchange included in the letter, Mr. Hannity urged Ms. McEnany to keep the president away from certain advisers. “Key now. No more crazy people,” Mr. Hannity wrote. Ms. McEnany replied: “Yes 100%.”

The former President made good use of the office’s opportunities for merchandising. The “SHOP” section of Trump’s Web site features hats and T-shirts, as well as stemless wineglasses, plastic straws, playing cards, and Christmas stockings emblazoned with Trump’s name. According to his former campaign manager, by spring of 2019, he’d sold nearly a million red maga hats, priced at forty-five dollars each. But the official wares are supplemented by a parallel economy of ersatz Trump-branded ephemera sold at roadside stands, state-fair booths, strip-mall stores, online marketplaces, and by a caravan of itinerant salespeople who follow him from rally to rally.

Nicoll, who is an expert on the study of brain slices, told me he was shocked to see Cassava assert that it had tested the effects of its drug on the brains of deceased Alzheimer’s patients which had been frozen and then thawed months, or even years, later. “It’s hard for me to imagine how you could get any life from that tissue,” he said. “I mean, this is wild. It’s zombie science!”

Erik Seidel, a pro who learned the game in the 1980s, told me that if players like Koon traveled back in time just 15 years with today’s knowledge, they would crush the best players of that era. “I think also that all the people in the game would think that they were fish,” Seidel said, using the poker argot for bad players, “There are a lot of really strange plays now that these guys are making that are effective — but if people saw them back in the day, I think that they’d be invited into the game every night.”

“I’m feeling super depressed right now,” the visual artist Magalie Guérin said. “I’m hearing no conversation about criticality. What makes this art?”

In unsparing terms rarely uttered by one leader of the United States about another, Biden castigated the man he referred to sixteen times only as “the former President.” Trump, he said, was not just “a former President”—he’s “a defeated former President.” He “created and spread a web of lies” about the 2020 election. He put his “bruised ego” over the Constitution and the country. He and his followers, in attacking the peaceful transfer of power, “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy.”

Far-right mass shootings are an increasingly international phenomenon. Although many killers act alone, they manifest similar ideologies through attacks that build on and take inspiration from one another. The Christchurch shooting in 2019 inspired the El Paso and Poway shooters, along with the Hanau shootings and the Norway mosque attack in 2020. And while the Denver shooter did not explicitly mention the perpetrators of those heinous attacks, his ideology bears many of the same characteristic traits.

Mr. Bannon’s show was removed from Spotify in November 2020 after he discussed beheading federal officials, but it remains available on Apple and Google.

Listening, I wondered, Could I make this my life? Banking dashboards, cryptocurrency wallets, ledgers and spreadsheets. I tried to imagine myself in a corporate-owned and venture-funded metaverse: a virtual axolotl in a virtual sweater, writing for a virtual magazine in a virtual office, hemorrhaging virtual money.