Category: Dark

The speeches by two of the most senior members of the Trump Administration were not just verbal lashings of America’s allies but a wholesale rejection of eighty years of U.S. foreign policy. In this extraordinary moment, it’s worth recalling how and why nato came to be.

Two decades ago, Bush’s Republican Party chose to topple the far-off regime of Saddam Hussein. It’s worth taking a second to reflect that, only a short political lifetime later, the government that Trump’s G.O.P. has chosen to go after is our own.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran diplomat and analyst of the Middle East, told me that his “head was exploding” as he watched Trump. “In twenty-seven years of working for Democrats and Republicans, I’ve never heard a press conference like this,” he said.

He compared it with Bakhmut, when machine gunners had to be regularly replaced because they could not handle the pace of killing. “After two hours of laying down so many people, they couldn’t take it mentally,” he said.

Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?

When the pre-program started, I was confined to the metal barricades of the press pen, so I talked to a man standing next to it. “I hate Democrats,” he told me. “They’re demons.” He went on, “I can’t say for sure Trump is a Christian. I don’t really care,” he said. “I’ve done some really bad things—violent things, armed robbery, thirty-year sentence, escaped, jumped parole, out on parole violation for fifteen years. I wasn’t doing anything except trying to be free.” He, like many rallygoers I’ve met since the summer, said Trump was not safe, because he had threatened to “drain the swamp” of “the F.B.I., the C.I.A.—really evil people.”

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.

He paused to glance down at a page. (Apparently, Hulk Hogan speaks from paper notes.)