In the early Trump years, I worried about being hyperbolic — that sounding the alarm about his corruption and authoritarianism would look silly when he made it through his term without breaking the world. By the end of the Trump presidency, I worried that I wasn’t being hyperbolic enough — that I and other political writers weren’t sounding enough alarms about the damage he’d done to the rule of law, about how dangerously illiberal his Republican Party had become, about how our democratic institutions weren’t strong enough to handle his full-frontal assault.
In the early Trump years, I worried about being hyperbolic — that sounding the alarm about his corruption and authoritarianism would look silly when he made it through his term without breaking the world. By the end of the Trump presidency, I worried that I wasn’t being hyperbolic enough — that I and other political writers weren’t sounding enough alarms about the damage he’d done to the rule of law, about how dangerously illiberal his Republican Party had become, about how our democratic institutions weren’t strong enough to handle his full-frontal assault.