Magazine Work

In a period of massive political disruption, Democrats are largely left choosing between conventional figures. A former vice president. Three U.S. senators. Even the supposed insurgent, a gay, small-town mayor from the Midwest, is a Harvard and McKinsey alum who once ran for national party chairman. The remaining two candidates are the party’s two richest political donors. The only true maverick is Yang.

Most Republicans in Washington are biting their tongues when it comes to Donald Trump, fearful that any candid criticisms of the new president could invite a backlash from their constituents or, potentially worse, provoke retribution from the commander in chief himself. Mark Sanford is not like most Republicans in Washington.

In my travel across America this year, I detected one common feeling that binds together this deeply fractured nation: fear. Fear of violence. Fear for their livelihoods. Fear of far-left socialism or far-right authoritarianism. Fear that our best days are behind us. Fear that America is no longer capable of conquering its great challenges. Above all, fear that we are too alienated, too angry with each other, too fundamentally misunderstood by the other half of society to ever truly heal.

Having spent the 96 hours following Election Day stewing on the divisions in her party, Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin came out firing in a manner that caught me off-guard. She wasn’t just interested in settling scores with the liberal left. She was intent on making her case that Donald Trump, one of the most divisive and hated politicians in American history, had exposed a weakness in her party that could lead to its destruction.

The ascent of the 45th president has left a wreckage of relationships in its wake—neighbors, friends and families divided along lines of partisanship if not political philosophy. Yet there has been no more dramatic divergence than that of Pence and Flake, once ideological soulmates and indivisible comrades who now embody the right’s most extreme reactions to Trumpism.

For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.

She may have been Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominee—the first in American history to require a tiebreaking confirmation vote cast by the vice president. Yet she runs the administration’s smallest and arguably least potent federal department. And after nine months in office, it has become apparent to the education secretary that she has limited power to transform the nation’s schools. If anything, DeVos had more influence as a private citizen in Michigan than she does now in Washington.

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.