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His first date with his future wife was spent in a New Hampshire motel room drinking Wild Turkey into the wee hours with Hunter S. Thompson. He stood several feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. during the “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to China with Richard M. Nixon and walked away from Watergate unscathed. He survived Iran-Contra, too, and sat alongside Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavík Summit. He invaded America’s living rooms and pioneered the rhetorical combat that would power the cable news age. He defied the establishment by challenging a sitting president of his own party. Oh, and his third-party candidacy in 2000 almost certainly handed George W. Bush the presidency.

There's no groundswell in Congress for a constitutional amendment to adopt a national popular vote. Instead, the most viable campaign to change how Americans choose their leader is being waged at booze-soaked junkets in luxury hotels around the country and even abroad, as an obscure group peddles a controversial idea: that state legislatures can put the popular-vote winner in the White House.

It’s one thing to be 15 months into your first term and suddenly blindsided by a rampaging disease the likes of which no living politician has encountered; to be thrust into worldwide renown by virtue of a beef with the president and a rising body count in your backyard; to know that your every flinch and syllable are being judged by citizens today and history tomorrow. It’s another thing to realize, all the while, that you’re auditioning for the job of vice president.

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.

The most essential branch of the United States government is collapsing before our eyes. Plagued by saleable corruption, animated by instinctive partisanship and defined by intellectual dishonesty, its disrepair grows more apparent—and somehow, more accepted—with each passing day. Its crisis of leadership and lack of qualified personnel are doing long-term damage. Its abdication of basic responsibilities levied by the Constitution makes a mockery of the Framers’ intent. And the presidency is in bad shape, too.

The plane had slid off the runway and sliced through a concrete track designed to buffer us from tragedy. Dozens of rescue vehicles were now screaming across the airport in our direction, sirens blaring in the brisk October evening; first responders would soon climb the back stairs and shout for us to evacuate immediately. “I didn’t realize it,” Mike Pence told us of the accident, “until I saw mud on the front windows.” Of course, it’s impossible to survey the wreckage from inside the plane.

Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in the weeks leading up to the Capitol siege sounded anxious. The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.

Everyone knows Washington's policy: No negotiating with terrorists. But by January of 2013, John Boehner had no choice. By seeking assistance from a rebel group of conservatives, the Speaker was accepting its de facto control of his conference. Supplication was the only way to salvage his speakership. The defenders of the faith--the ideological warriors who argue that principles are not bargaining chips--had finally penetrated the innermost sanctum of power.