Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 46

Seth Meyers’s Promise to Donald Trump

For the last 18 months, comedy’s relationship with the presidential election has been an uneasy one. Some late-night hosts, like Jimmy Fallon and James Corden, have largely avoided its darker implications, plowing on with less uncomfortable humor to try and unite a polarized audience. Others, like John Oliver and  Samantha Bee, have been polemical, offering an unfiltered point of view applauded for its honesty, if pitched at a smaller crowd. Late Night with Seth Meyers has tended toward the latter approach, with its host clearly articulating his left-leaning point of view and taking apart many of Trump’s stated policies.

Last night, in his first broadcast since Trump’s election, Meyers gave a 10-minute speech that could help chart a path for the next four years in his job. He was at once sharply funny and nakedly emotional. He made an effort to speak to Trump supporters without seeming entirely condescending. He acknowledged that in his position as a well-off white guy, his anguish at the electoral result was not the only perspective required on the night. He told jokes, of course, but with the awareness that jokes alone won’t be what his audience needs going forward.

In the last two days, much ink has been spilled on the notion that society has become excessively blinkered, sectioned off by social media that echoes back like-minded thinking at everyone who uses it. Before the election, the same was said of shows like Full Frontal or Late Night, that wide swaths of voters were sick of being lectured to by TV comedians. Meyers did well to address that without seeming like he was pandering, or suddenly blowing with the wind—his beliefs are still obviously his beliefs, but that doesn’t make him ignorant of the world around him.

“I felt a lot of emotions last night and into today, some sadness, some anger, some fear,” he said. “But I’m also aware that those are a lot of emotions that Trump supporters felt, emotions that led them to make their choice. And it would be wrong for me to think that my emotions are somehow more authentic than their emotions. We’re always better as a society when we have empathy for one another.”

Still, Meyers’s greatest empathy was for those around him crushed by Clinton’s loss; including his mother, who he noted was excited to cast a vote for the first female presidential candidate. Meyers’s voice cracked as he delivered that anecdote, dropping the typically arch, fake-newsman personality he honed over years at Saturday Night Live and Late Night. He also did well to acknowledge the people of color and LGBTQ viewers watching, saying, “As a white man, I…know that any emotions I’m feeling are likely a fraction [of theirs] ... Hopefully the Trump administration and Trump supporters will be compassionate to them. Because they need your compassion.”

Most importantly, Meyers voiced the thought pulsing through every Clinton voter’s mind a day after the election: that maybe Trump’s changeability, his willingness to adopt different political positions over the years as he wooed difference audiences, would mean his administration would surprise them. It’s a slim hope, and a strange one—to rely on someone’s untrustworthiness. But while moments of Meyers’s monologue were punctuated by anger, others by fear, and others by self-deprecating humility, it was that naked honesty that felt the most memorable.

Best of all, though, was his promise for the future, one that’s likely to echo across other programs like Bee’s, Oliver’s, Trevor Noah’s, and more. “Democracy is a fantastic thing, even when it doesn’t go your way. It gives everyone in America a voice, and last night, those voices spoke,” Meyers concluded. “Donald Trump made a lot of promises as to what he was going to do over the next four years, and now we get to see if he will, if he can, fulfill them. So I’d just like to make one promise to him: We here at Late Night will be watching you.” During the Obama administration, the role of political comedy was at times listless, poking fun at what seemed like the margins—cable news, extremism, and outspoken celebrities like Trump. Now, that celebrity is in the White House, and the focus will no longer be at the margins, but at the seat of power. It’s a bigger responsibility, but also one with greater weight.

The Best Show That Explores Sexual Assault

Public conversations about rape culture and sexual assault have perhaps never been as prevalent as they are now, thanks to college-orientation flyers, headlines about the 2016 presidential election, and survivor-powered social-media campaigns like #NotOkay. And like most issues of national importance, the subject has been increasingly tackled in pop culture, particularly on television. But greater visibility hasn’t necessarily translated into more sensitive or resonant stories about sexual violence.

Real-life survivors might struggle to find their experiences reflected accurately in the “shock-and-arouse” approach of shows such as Game of Thrones, which rely on titillation or use rape as a cheap plot device. Law & Order: SVU often depersonalizes sexual assault by treating it either as ripped-from-the-tabloids fodder or as a chance to illuminate political issues like the rape-kit backlog. Shows like Jessica Jones and The Americans have worked toward a more authentic, survivor-oriented depiction of life after rape—but they refract the experience through the fantastical lenses of superhero and spy genres. This approach may make for compelling television, but has an element of wish fulfillment that feels alien to many survivors, who must move through a more mundane world in their recovery.

So it’s ironic that perhaps the best drama to explore the trauma of sexual assault is a show that, unlike SVU or Game of Thrones, very few people watch: SundanceTV’s Rectify. The acclaimed series, which recently began its fourth and final season, takes a more straightforward, sobering, and subtle approach to sexual violence than many TV audiences are used to. Rectify follows Daniel Holden (Aden Young), a man released from a 19-year stint on death row after being wrongly convicted of killing his girlfriend. Daniel’s experiences of sexual assault in prison inform his character and the story in meaningful ways after he returns to his hometown of Paulie, Georgia, and tries to rebuild his life. Rectify doesn’t valorize or pity him, but it also doesn’t expect him to “get over” what happened and move on. The show’s exploration of gender, victimhood, and recovery distinguishes it from other series and sets an important example for how TV can grapple with rape in a way that’s both artistically engaging and empathetic to survivors.

Rectify establishes its protagonist’s history early on with a powerful scene of Daniel narrating an account of his attacks. In the second episode of the first season, Daniel’s stepbrother, Teddy (Clayne Crawford), asks if men on death row receive “conjugal visits,” his smile betraying an unspoken prison-rape joke. Daniel responds by describing his own gang rape: He talks about putting up a fight as a “gesture to [his] manhood,” though his struggles were always futile. He talks about how one of the most humiliating parts of the immediate aftermath was walking back to his cell feeling like “a freak show,” because the “good guys won’t even look at [him].” As Teddy’s face tightens into a look of horror, Daniel talks about seeing his rapists’ faces behind the other cell doors: men who “look at you [like they can] literally consume you, eat your heart, and shit you out like you were nothing.”

The moment is so potent in part because it’s a rare example of a male survivor publicly excavating his own grief. The only other series that’s so extensively featured men as victims is HBO’s Oz, which tended to treat prison rape as a Grand Guignol soap opera. But the scene also echoes throughout the rest of the series, adding necessary context to many of Daniel’s interactions. In the season-four premiere, the protagonist finds himself living uneasily in a halfway house for other ex-cons in Nashville. When his three other roommates crowd into his room to confront him for being aloof, Daniel’s body clenches protectively, a reflex familiar to any survivor who might bristle after having an old memory triggered. The creator of Rectify, Ray McKinnon, told me he and his writers understand that the aftershocks of sexual assault can reverberate slowly: “It wouldn’t be something, [that] in real life, that a person would get over easily, if ever.”

Unlike many survivors on TV, Daniel’s assault continues to impede his ability to relate to other people.

Rectify departs from shows that revel in the splashier sides of sexual violence, like Game of Thrones, which has inserted rape into storylines that, in the novels, featured either consensual sex or no sex at all. Another HBO show, Westworld, is centers around a futuristic theme park where female androids are at constant risk of rape. Meanwhile, AMC’s hit series The Walking Dead has used sexual assault to amplify the hellishness of its post-apocalypse, including in one scene where a biker gang threatens to rape the protagonist’s pre-teen son to death.

Though he’s miles away from his old jail cell in season four, Daniel is still unmoored by the horrors of prison. Unlike many survivors on TV, Daniel’s assault continues to impede his ability to relate to other people, particularly women, as well as himself. In the first episode of season four, he tries to tells his counselor, Avery, about the isolation and loss of agency he feels: “If I am dead, then why do I feel so goddamn lonely?” Outlander’s Jamie Fraser is perhaps the only other major male TV character whose rape factors significantly into his storyline, but Jamie is eventually healed by the love of his wife, Claire. Jamie’s capacity to enjoy sex, even after a torturous assault, testifies to his strength and manliness on the show. On Rectify, Daniel receives no such comfort. He is capable only of nervous, furtive attempts to connect with unavailable women, including his sister-in-law Tawney (Adelaide Clemens). In the fourth season opener, he finally connects with a woman who isn’t a family member and begins to cry, in part, from the magnitude of it.

Certainly, other shows offer psychologically resonant portrayals of survival. Jessica Jones features its heroine’s flashbacks to her assaults and shows her practiced attempts to calm herself by repeating the names of the streets she lived on as a child. The Americans’ cold-hearted heroine, Elizabeth Jennings, slowly warms to her husband as she comes to terms with her own teenage rape. Even Game of Thrones gives the young Sansa Stark a chance to confront the man who sold her to her rapist, with her telling him, “I can still feel what he did in my body.” But Jessica Jones eventually gets to snap her rapist’s neck; Elizabeth beats the hell out of hers; and Sansa watches calmly as a pack of dogs tears the flesh from her batterer’s face. The imperative given to women who are labeled as “survivors” is to take their power back and move on—to prove they can be valiant and formidable against any kind of horror.

Whenever Rectify has been explicit, it has done so to illuminate something darker about living on after abuse.

In some ways, Daniel is freed from the burden of representation, of needing to affirm how tough and stoic his gender can actually be. He is alternately withdrawn and prone to eruptions of violence—and not a righteous violence against his attackers. His target becomes his brother-in-law, Teddy, who represents a kind of uncomplicated masculinity he’ll never enjoy. Daniel’s reactions to Teddy’s taunts about “conjugal visits” are rooted in a visceral sense of shame that many male survivors feel, the show’s creator McKinnon said. “Daniel makes a decision to tell [Teddy] in the most provocative way,” McKinnon added. “He wanted Teddy to feel uncomfortable, to feel dirty, to feel some of [his] shame” by spelling out the graphic details of his attacks.

Daniel’s wish to make Teddy “feel some of his shame” culminates in season one’s fifth episode, which features one of the show’s few scenes of actual violence. When the two men are alone at the family tire store, Teddy mocks Daniel: “When you said it doesn’t do any good to fight back ... what I wanna know is, did you fight back, or did you just relax and enjoy it?” And then, suddenly, Rectify upends Teddy’s expectation of safety as a man. As Teddy stands in front of the gurgling coffee maker in the tire store’s tiny breakroom, Daniel grabs him from behind, wrestling him to the ground in a choke hold. In the very next episode, Teddy comes to on the cold floor with his pants pulled down and coffee grounds piled atop his bare bottom.

This attack, which is filmed at a distance, is clearly meant to sicken the viewer. But whenever Rectify has been unsettlingly explicit, it has done so to illuminate something darker and more real about living in the aftermath of abuse. Though Daniel does not rape Teddy, the nature of his attack is blatantly sexual, and its intent is clear. Daniel wants to make Teddy feel vulnerable and humiliated, to remind him that, at the right time on the wrong day, he too could find himself unable to fight back. This scene is inspired, in part, by McKinnon’s readings on sexual assault in prison: “You know, it’s ... human for someone who has been assaulted in prison or some other arena to act out ... particularly if they are male. That happens every day.”

Daniel isn’t portrayed as disposable like many of Law & Order: SVU’s victims of the week, and he isn’t like Jessica Jones, who ultimately protects other victims. He is, as McKinnon says, “a complex … damaged human being.” You could argue that Daniel gets to be “unlikeable” in ways that even characters like Jones or Jennings aren’t allowed because he’s a man. When female survivors lash out, their violence must be directed solely toward taking revenge against their attackers; they aren’t allowed to simply be angry, and to deploy that anger in messy, even unfair, ways. Daniel Holden, however, has no hope of real retribution; he walks around in a fugue state punctuated by moments of rage. And since this sort of fury is more commonly associated with men, there’s less of a need for the story to contextualize or justify his violent outbursts.

On Rectify, catharsis doesn’t come after 45 minutes, or even at all.

Teddy’s reaction to his assault is similarly opaque, particularly because he subverts “the good survivor” narrative. A “good survivor” reports his attack right away, cooperates with the authorities, grieves with loved ones, and eventually accepts that what happened to him wasn’t his fault. But on Rectify, there’s no Lt. Olivia Benson to say things like, “You survived the abuse, you’re gonna survive the recovery.” When Teddy’s wife, Tawney, catches him washing the coffee-ground stains off his pants, he makes up an excuse rather than admitting he was violated. He’s frantically performing in order to meet the standards of all-American masculinity, becoming fixated on the tire store’s success, starting fights with clients, and pushing Tawney to start a family. But it’s not a sustainable approach to recovery.

Teddy’s story offers a different, but no less sensitive, exploration of gender and sexual violence. Daniel’s attack, McKinnon says, “ultimately ... broke Teddy down in a way that he had to start dealing with himself.” Stripping down Teddy’s defenses gives him a sharper understanding of his own male privilege and of consent. In season three, during a joyride with his teenage half-brother, Jared, Teddy recalls being Jared’s age, and asking out a girl “with a reputation, I guess you might say.” His voice is sorrowful as he tells Jared that kissing is “as far as she wanted to go … but I had my mind set on doin’ it.” Teddy tries to defend his actions, but he sounds conflicted: “I didn’t force her or date rape her or whatever ... I just kept at it ... finally, she just gave up a big ol’ sigh ... and let me have it.” Then he advises Jared to never, ever do what he did: “Those guys who make you feel like a pussy because you ain’t got your cherry popped, they’re just a bunch of assholes.”

The power of Teddy’s personal reckoning shows just how much Rectify differs from shows that use assault as a backstory for “unlikeable” characters like House of Cards’ Claire Underwood or Scandal’s Mellie Grant. Teddy’s trauma makes him, if not more sympathetic, then at least more complex, while also making broader points about rape culture. On Rectify, catharsis doesn’t come after 45 minutes, or even at all. Sometimes there is no justice, only the quiet loss of one’s essence and dignity—followed by the hard-fought, uncelebrated decision to, as Daniel’s counselor encourages him, try and live again. This isn’t necessarily the experience of every rape survivor, but it’s certainly one that is underexplored on TV.

It is telling that the show that most actively resists the Game of Thrones approach to sexual violence and focuses on a male, not female, survivor. This is in part, perhaps, because male bodies aren’t as overtly sexualized or commodified as women’s bodies; a combination of treating women as objects of fantasy and as symbols has helped create a culture that can be genuinely callous to their suffering. But Rectify is nonetheless a crucial step forward for television and will hopefully be a guide for other shows. Daniel Holden’s numbness, grief, and rage, have breathed depth and meaning into that checklist of PTSD symptoms found on rape crisis centers’ websites. And, for McKinnon, these feelings will echo on even after Rectify’s final credits roll: “I’m sure long after we quit filming our characters will still be dealing with their issues.”

A Short History of Awkward Presidential Transitions

Donald Trump questioned whether President Obama was born in the U.S. Obama called Trump a “classic reality-TV entertainer” who is “unfit” for the presidency. On Thursday, Trump, who elected the 45th U.S. president this week, heads to the White House to meet with the man he’ll succeed in the first public step toward a transition. It won’t be the first awkward meeting between a president and his successor who haven’t hidden their mutual distaste.

Awkward presidential transitions are almost as old as the United States itself. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers who were once friends, found themselves on the opposite sides of the Federalist-Republican divide. After the testy 1800 election, in which Jefferson defeated his rival, the men fell out almost completely. During the campaign, Jefferson’s supporters described Adams’s character as “hideous [and] hermaphroditical,” while those who backed Adams referred to Jefferson as “mean-spirited and low-lived.” Relations had reached such lows that Adams wasn’t present on the day of Jefferson’s inauguration. It took more than a decade for them to resume their friendship.

The presidential election of 1828 was a rematch between John Quincy Adams, the incubment, and Andrew Jackson, who’d been deprived of the presidency in 1824 by the “corrupt bargain.” The campaign was nasty, even by today’s standards. Jackson’s marriage came under intense scrutiny, as did his ownership of slaves. When the election results were announced, Jackson had won, his supporters stormed the White House, and Adams had to escape through the back.

The 1860 election led to what was perhaps the most significant presidential inauguration in American history: Seven Southern states states seceded between the 1860 election and Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in March of the following year. James Buchanan, the man who Lincon succeed, believed that while states didn’t have the right to break away, the Constitution did not empower the president to prevent them.  

Nine years later, more drama: Andrew Johnson, the highly unpopular outgoing president, did not attend the inauguration because his successor, Ulysses S. Grant, had refused to sit next to him in the carriage. Johnson remained in the White House during the ceremony.

In the 1932 election, President Hoover called his challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a “chameleon on plaid.” Roosevelt described the man he’d succeed as a “fat, timid capon.” Their first meeting at the White House was awkward, as was the period running up the inauguration by which time the U.S. economy was in such shambles that Hoover had become a reviled figure.

Twenty years later, Harry S. Truman prepared to hand over the reins of the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower. The two men had once been allies, working together in the last days of World War II, but had fallen out over what Truman regarded as Eisenhower’s silence on Senator Joe McCarthy. “He has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for,” Truman said. The transition itself didn’t go well, either. “Ike and his advisers are afraid of some kind of trick,” Truman wrote in his diary. “There are no tricks.”

In 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who’d decided not to run for a second term of his own, gave way to Richard Nixon, the former vice president. In the dying days of the presidential campaign, Nixon nixed any prospect of LBJ reaching a peace in Vietnam, where the war had been waging for years. Nixon, LBJ had said, had “blood on his hands.” But he still cooperated with President-elect Nixon, believing the threat from the Soviet Union made a smooth transition necessary.

President Carter met with Ronald Reagan after the 1980 election that swept Reagan to the White House. A news article from the time describes Carter saying: “We have a very good working relationship.” Personal relations between the two men were cool, however. Carter acknowledged as much in an interview two years later. In his book The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House, Douglas Brinkley, the historian, describes the sniping between the Carter and Reagan camps during the transition, as well as an alleged slight directed at Rosalynn Carter by Nancy Reagan. About the meeting between the two men, he wrote: “Reagan left the meeting impressed by Carter's ‘graciousness’ and ‘mastery of detail.’ … After the briefing, Reagan … reviewed the essence of what Carter had said in a private, forty-five-minute meeting.” Here’s more:

Reagan recalled verbatim everything Carter had told us," [Ed] Meese remembered, defending his old boss against accusations from the Carter camp that the president-elect had been inattentive. "He didn't take notes because he didn't need to." Meese believed that Reagan had felt sorry for Carter at the White House that day—that the Gipper was just not a good hater. "Though he profoundly disagreed with Carter on policy issues, Reagan harbored no mean-spiritedness toward Carter," Meese insisted. "It's usually the loser that is full of sour grapes."

Thursday’s meeting at the White House may be awkward, but it’d be an awkwardness that aligns with history.

Does the Democratic Party Have a Future?

Long, long ago, on Monday, when a Hillary Clinton victory seemed likely, the forecast for the Democratic Party looked grim. The party was confident that its aging candidate, the spouse of another former Democratic president, could win, and it was optimistic about winning control of the Senate. Clinton might serve (to borrow a phrase) as a bridge to the 2010s, but the next two elections would be much tougher: Democrats would be defending a lot of difficult Senate seats in 2018, and simple structural forces made it unlikely a President Clinton could hold the White House for two terms. Who would lead the party then?

Instead, the nightmare has arrived early. All of those dangers still beset the party, but now without the bridge of a Clinton presidency to ease the blow. Donald Trump will enter the White House with a Republican Senate and a Republican House. Because President Obama was unable to get the Senate to vote on his appointee for an open Supreme Court seat, Trump will immediately have the chance to appoint a ninth member to the Court, breaking a 4-4 tie. At the state level, Republicans now control at least 34 governorships, the most since 1922, and ran up their advantage in state legislatures.

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The result is that much of the Barack Obama legacy, the most sweeping and impressive progressive program of social reform since Lyndon Johnson, is in peril. There are many places where Trump and the leaders of the Republican Congress disagree, but they have all pushed for the chance to dismantle two signature Obama achievements: the Affordable Care Act, which was the crowning if incomplete culmination of decades of Democratic effort; and both domestic and multilateral efforts to slow climate change. A conservative majority on the Court also throws long-settled precedents like Roe v. Wade into question.

As if that’s not bad enough, it’s hard to see who will lead the party back now. Smart analysts have been warning of the weak Democratic bench for years, but the Clinton loss makes it even more urgent. Clinton, at 69, is unlikely to maintain a high-profile presence. Her defeat also signals the final eclipse of the political dynasty that her husband, Bill Clinton, constructed in the 1980s and 1990s and rode to two terms in the White House. This is not without irony: Bill Clinton was elected president with the support of many white, blue-collar voters, but Hillary Clinton and the team of confidants they had built up lost because of the same voters—in part thanks to Bill Clinton’s policies (in particular, NAFTA) and in part thanks to racial backlash against Barack Obama.

Obama, whose strong popularity ratings could not save Clinton, will remain a leader for the party for years to come, but he will never top a ballot again, and this cycle proved that he doesn’t have the capacity to single-handedly drag a Democratic nominee over the finish line, either.

Bernie Sanders electrified many voters, and there’s a raging battle among progressives today over whether he might have fared better in a general election, but given that he is 75 today, he is unlikely to be a repeat candidate for president. Who then? Elizabeth Warren is widely loved by the most progressive Democrats, but she, too is aging—she’ll be 71 on Election Day 2020—and somewhat unproven, having only won a single election in the bluest state in America. Tim Kaine’s profile has risen, but his low-key campaigning style didn’t exactly set Democrats afire. There is a crop of young senators who might vie for the title, like Cory Booker, who is charismatic but bland and associated with the centrist, neoliberal wing of the party. Kamala Harris, the newly elected senator from California, is viewed as a rising star, but she is just that, a newly elected senator, so it’s hard to know her future. Republican domination of governorships robs the Democratic Party of another pipeline.

Some Democrats, witnessing Michelle Obama’s commanding performances on the stump this year, have fantasized about her running for president in 2020. But she has evinced zero interest in electoral politics, and the Clinton experience should probably give Democrats pause about putting their trust in beloved former dynasties.

Of course, deciding who will lead the party is intertwined with what the party will look like. Obama has managed to hold a coalition of leftist and centrist Democrats together, but that is already crumbling. There will be great pressure for the party to adopt a vision that draws on the populist success of both Trump and Sanders, but that pressure will meet opposition from party insiders as well as from the educated, well-to-do whites on whom the party increasingly depends. With the Republican Party looking like an anti-free-trade bloc, Democrats could try to become the party of business, but that might only worsen the problems that sank Clinton. There’s no obvious answer to how the party can reconcile its need for some working-class whites with the focus on social and racial justice that has become a Democratic priority, driven by the near unification of minorities under the party’s banner.

Democratic success in Nevada, driven by the muscle of labor unions, might look like a bright spot, but it’s difficult to see how it is replicated. Unions are in secular decline, more and more states have adopted “right to work” laws, and a conservative Supreme Court and Congress are likely to continue curtailing the power of unions at the national level.

This makes the stakes in the two next elections very high. First, there’s 2018. On the House side, past trends suggest Republicans will likely lose ground in the House, but Democrats will have to win seats in several red states just to stay even in the Senate. Then comes the 2020 election. If Democrats can win then, behind whatever candidate eventually emerges, they may be in decent shape. But if they lose, the outlook is very grim. Just look to Republican success in 2010, ahead of the Census and redistricting of Congress. By winning across the board, the GOP was able to give the map a lasting tilt toward Republican dominance. A Democratic win in 2020 could rebalance that, but a loss would make the systemic challenges even greater. (There’s a reason that Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder have already announced plans to focus on trying to help Democrats at the state level after Obama leaves office.)

The last couple decades have shown the folly of predictions of party demise, from Karl Rove’s wrecked dream of a “permanent Republican majority” to Democratic hubris in 2008, right up through forecasts of the demise of the GOP earlier this year. As Harold Macmillan may or may not have said, what makes a politician, and by extension a party, is “events, dear boy,” and one cannot assume all exogenous factors will remain stable.

If Democrats have anything on their side, it’s the same force that was supposed to save them in 2016: demographic change. As the nation gets less white, a Republican Party largely dependent on white votes will get less tenable. But many smart analysts predicted that would decide this election, too. Just days after its death was foretold, the Republican Party is radically changed but holds great power, while the Democratic Party is the one on life support.

Clinton Concedes; Pundits Decide She's 'Emotional'

Hillary Clinton, on Wednesday, delivered a speech that was, above all, an endorsement of the United States and its democracy. She told the supporters who had gathered to hear her speak that Americans must cherish the Constitution—even if they don’t agree with every outcome of its guidance. We must, collectively, she said, respect the rule of law. We must find ways to appreciate each other, and to be, in our messy way, a country. It was a speech designed both to jump-start the healing process for a weary, wounded nation, and to rebuke the anti-democratic rhetoric that has been part of the most contentious presidential campaign in recent memory. It was simple, and it was powerful.

Not, however, according to CNN. The first assessment Wolf Blitzer offered about Clinton’s concession statement, after the network’s camera cut back to its waiting roundtable of pundits, was that it was a “very, very emotional speech.” Blitzer added, of Clinton: “You saw her holding back, choking back those tears.” And then he added: “She is well known as being very, very emotional in these kinds of moments.”

It was a curious point to make, and not only because Clinton is traditionally accused of being overly stilted in her public appearances; “very, very emotional” also managed to brush aside much of the most substantive content of Clinton’s speech—all the urgent points about the benefits of liberal democracy and the peaceful transfer of power—in favor of its performance. In context, however, Blitzer’s initial assessment of Clinton’s speech made some sense. Before the speech had begun—as the pundits were chatting and otherwise filling the air—Blitzer had wondered specifically whether Clinton would tear up as she delivered her public concession of the presidency she has spent so many years of her life seeking. He was, in his post-speech focus on Clinton’s emotions, simply answering his own question.

The anchor then turned to his panelist, the CNN regular Gloria Borger. “Gloria,” Blitzer said, “you saw Hillary, Hillary Clinton, deliver a very emotional, powerful speech. Clearly, it’s not something she wanted to say.”

Borger acknowledged that. And then she talked about the apology that the speech—via its line “I’m sorry that we did not win this election”—offered. Clinton, Borger said, “came out at the top of the speech and said, ‘I’m sorry. Period.’” Borger added: “That’s what women do. They apologize right away, and say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

These were striking frames, given not just the message of the speech itself, but also the context in which Clinton delivered it. Here was the first woman to approach the American presidency, doing the crucial work of democratic reconciliation: avowing the urgency of the rule of law, discussing her continued love for the American experiment, urging her supporters to keep hoping and fighting and believing that the American future will be better than the American past. Clinton’s voice, as she delivered the final messages of her hard-fought campaign, wavered, yes, once. She included lines like “I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together” and “this is painful and it will be for a long time.” Mostly, though, she focused on the idea that “our campaign was never about one person.” She spoke of the needs of the country—and she did so forcefully. And calmly. And with conviction. Not a tear in sight.

It was in fact Tim Kaine, her running mate, who misted up and seemed to choke back tears as he addressed the crowd before Clinton made her entrance.

And yet, according to CNN, what came through most powerfully as she conceded the presidency to Donald Trump is that Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former senator and Secretary of State, the woman who by an extremely narrow margin lost her bid to become Commander in Chief, is ultimately “somebody who emotes”—somebody who, today, “said what she was feeling, and as we suspected beforehand, not just about herself, but about all the people that she clearly thinks that she let down.”

This was all, as it happened, a fitting bookend to Clinton’s second bid for the presidency. The politician, it barely bears repeating, has had a long and complicated relationship with the American media—one that has been additionally complicated by media members’ expectations of what it means not just to be a public figure, but to be a public figure who is also a woman. “Emotion,” or “emoting,” as CNN had it, is part of that.

Pundits expected her to be a woman, but not too much. To be feminine, but not too much.

In 2008, when Clinton was battling Barack Obama for the that cycle’s Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton made a campaign stop at a coffee shop in New Hampshire. A woman there asked her a seemingly innocuous question: “How did you get out the door every day? I mean, as a woman, I know how hard it is to get out of the house and get ready. Who does your hair?” Clinton gave her response—“this is very personal for me, not just political”—and, as she spoke, misted up, very slightly. And yet the media who witnessed the event, both in person and through other means, wrote up the incident like so: “Hillary Tears Up On The Campaign Trail,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Clinton Shows Emotion in Final Hours,” the Boston Globe announced. “An Emotional Clinton vows to Fight On” (Reuters). “Emotional Clinton says, This is personal” (AP). The Huffington Post was decidedly elegant about it: “Clinton Emotional,” it said.

Many of these assessments were favorable. (“A Chink in the Steely Façade of Hillary Clinton,” the Washington Post called the event. And Maureen Dowd took it upon herself to wonder, “Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?”) But they were also, in the aggregate, yet more evidence of the double bind in which the first woman presidential nominee found herself, repeatedly, as she fought for the presidency: Pundits expected her to be a woman, but not too much. To be feminine, but not too much. And when she gave no obvious evidence of femininity … they would find it anyway.

Which brings us back to November of 2016—and to, today, everyone from USA Today to TMZ to AOL to Vocativ to the Huffington Post to New York magazine to Time magazine describing Clinton’s speech, in the headlines they’ve selected to tell its story, as “emotional.” And to CNN’s David Gergen announcing that, in the concession, “She opened up. She opened herself up ... and you could see the pain. It was so apparent, the pain she’s going through, and you could just imagine how many tears have flowed since last night.”

Gergen seemed to want her, on some level, to be hurt. To cry. To be emotional. Not because he is cruel, but because she is a woman, and that—as Gloria Borger reminded CNN’s viewers this morning—is what women do. Back in 2008, Newsweek wrote of Clinton’s New Hampshire coffee shop exchange as “Hillary Clinton’s emotional moment.” Eight years later, despite the progress many Americans have congratulated themselves on having made, that frame lives on. Right after Clinton’s speech and its assessments, CNN switched shows; John King took over as anchor. The topic, however, remained the same: “More of her emotional statement,” King promised, “in a bit.”

'Brexit Plus, Plus, Plus'

The polls tightened in the last few days before the vote. The establishment dismissed that as an aberration. While some citizens complained about being forgotten, about increased immigration, and a lack of meaningful jobs, elected officials spoke of the benefits of globalization and trade. When the results came in, this was the general reaction in the capital:

(Reuters)

I’m talking, of course, about the U.K.’s vote on June 23 to leave the European Union, a decision that now appears to have striking parallels to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th U.S. president. Although the political establishment and the chattering classes may have dismissed Trump’s chances, the Republican presidential nominee had consistently predicted that he was “going to do something so special.” It will, he said, be “Brexit plus, plus, plus.” He was right.

Much of the support for Brexit came from older voters who complained of living in a Britain they no longer recognized and in places like the Midlands and the north of England, once bastions of the center-left Labour Party. People there, former union workers, believed that globalization, in general, and the EU, in particular, had left them behind. The industries of these areas—steel and coal—had long disappeared and what jobs did remain often went to the citizens of EU countries who had free right of movement and employment anywhere in the bloc under the EU’s rules. Those sentiments, whether accurate or not, translated for a shock result on June 23. Leave won 52 percent to 48 percent.

Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s election mirrors some, but not all, of what happened in the U.K. On Wednesday, he tweeted: “The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again.” And indeed many of those people who propelled Trump to victory in the Electoral College, exit-poll data indicate, were from places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—Democratic and labor-union strongholds that have seen jobs leave and immigrants come. Indeed, one of Trump’s biggest champions in the U.K. was the highest-profile advocate for Brexit, Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who even appeared at a campaign event with Trump and other right-wing European leaders.

But the parallels don’t stop there. After all, domestic-political decisions in a world based on international commerce have global consequences. Although some of the most-severe warnings have yet to materialize, there have been high costs: The pound is near three-decade lows, which makes U.K. exports more attractive, but also raises the cost of imported goods and the risk of inflation; the U.K.’s AAA credit rating, the highest possible, has been downgraded, making the government’s borrowing costs higher; and the medium-term economic prospects appear anemic. The instability hinges on uncertainty over the exact nature of the U.K.’s exit from the EU. Talks on what the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU will look like can only begin when the government invokes Article 50 of the EU charter, which it plans to next year despite last week’s legal hurdle. Those talks, which will likely take two years, will decide whether the U.K. will retain its access to the EU’s single market, which U.K. businesses want but EU leaders are unlikely to yield to unless it’s accompanied by the free movement of workers. That demand, in turn, is one to which the U.K. government is unlikely to accede. In the meantime, stocks, which had slumped after the Brexit vote, have stabilized, recovering most of their losses in the nearly six months since.

It might be the same with Trump—and indeed some of signs could be seen Wednesday. When the possibility of a Trump victory began to emerge Tuesday night, stocks across the world began to tank. At one point, Dow futures were down more than 800 points, but since the U.S. markets opened Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 have mostly recovered. The Nasdaq is down. Stocks in Asia were sharply lower, but European markets recovered most of their early losses. What this means for the broader economy is harder to predict. Trump’s actions and policy prescriptions over the coming days and weeks will dictate whether his election was a black-swan event or if it will be business-as-usual for the U.S. and global economies.

What’s next? Brexit, and now Trump’s victory, might have stunned the establishment, but populist right- and left-wing groups have been gaining ground, especially in Western Europe, since the 2008 global recession, warning against job losses, immigration, and free trade. Three Western European countries— France, Germany, and the Netherlands—have elections scheduled for next year. Each has populist right-wing political parties that are gaining support, and each of those parties, no doubt, has taken the successes of Brexit and Trump as good signs.

How Stephen Colbert Tried to Process Trump’s Victory

In times of national strife and confusion, comedy has long served as a vital release valve, a therapeutic outlet for viewers confronting difficult moments. But Tuesday night, as Stephen Colbert aired a live special on Showtime during the most crucial hour of the election, catharsis seemed a million miles away. The election of Donald Trump as president was obviously a positive outcome for his many supporters. But for Colbert’s crowd, news of Trump picking up more and more states across the map prompted loud groans, and a bewildered performance by a host who clearly found less and less relief in humor.

Perhaps it says something about the vast polarization of America that the country’s divisions extend to the world of pop culture and to late-night television. Perhaps it was just an indicator that if relief or reconciliation lies ahead for the country after this bitter election, at this point it’s still too far off to comprehend. Calling Colbert’s Showtime special “Democracy’s Series Finale” was likely intended as nothing more than a cute gag, but as the night went on and Colbert progressed from scripted gags to somber conversation, the title seemed appropriate to his mood. It was a bizarre 90 minutes of television, a strange side dish to a similarly unpredictable night of broadcast TV, and it could very well set the tone for American comedy for the next four years.

Contributing to the special’s uncanny vibe was that Colbert was broadcasting from his usual studio, where he hosts The Late Show on CBS, but with the free rein granted by premium cable, he was swearing with aplomb. At first, he reeled off jokes echoing what was obviously an outcome he presumed would happen—the election of Hillary Clinton. “Donald Trump wanted to build a wall, and Hispanics want him to pay for it,” he said, noting increased Latino turnout in states in Florida and Texas.

The actor Jeff Goldblum appeared for a scripted bit mocking his nervy character from Jurassic Park, calling Trump a Republican Party experiment gone wrong. “The GOP took a hardened chunk of anger with prehistoric ideas and created a monster,” he stuttered, to appreciative laughs from the live audience. Then real-time news began to trickle in, with the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann joining Colbert to talk voting numbers and confront him with the reality that Trump was over-performing polls and likely to win states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

Colbert was once a chief clown for the left in his role at The Colbert Report, mocking the exaggerated right-wing punditry of Fox News. At The Late Show, he’s walked a tighter line, making his political feelings clear (he was obviously a Clinton voter) while trying to reach out with empathy to the other side. He’s noted that his whole extended family (from South Carolina) is politically divided, but that they love each other anyway. When he interviewed Trump, he tried to get the candidate to offer conciliatory words, and perhaps even apologize to people he might have offended during the campaign (Trump declined).

When Halperin finally told Colbert that Trump would likely win the election, the host visibly deflated. Comedy is, of course, allowed to be partisan, and it was not a moment where Colbert could disguise his feelings. “This has been the darkest presidential campaign that I’ve covered. I’ve covered every one since 1988, and in the aftermath, I think this is going to be a really challenging time for America. Good line for a comedy show, right?” Halperin said, half-jokingly. “I'm not sure if it’s a comedy show at this point,” Colbert replied, with a quiet grimace. “I think we’re in the middle of a documentary right now.” His words reflected the disbelief of millions who had trusted in public polls and data journalists predicting a victory for Clinton—and who all saw the results suddenly swerve in the opposite direction.

During their conversation, Florida was called for Trump, putting him on the doorstep of 270 electoral votes. “Wow. That’s a horrifying prospect,” Colbert said. “I can’t put a happy face on that, and that’s my job.” It was darkly compelling television, in all its awkwardness—it was live, it was unrehearsed, and it was, for at least a moment, deeply honest. Colbert made sure to note the division between his audience and the voting public. “For Trump supporters, this is porn, what we’re going through right now,” he said with a laugh.

The future of late-night comedy will hinge on how it reacts to a Trump administration.

For Clinton fans, and much of Colbert’s audience, perhaps the most necessary moment was Goldblum reappearing after Florida was called for Trump. He chatted soberly with the host about how he felt and how he wanted to approach the future. “Find yourself present in this moment, and say, ‘This is what’s going on,’” Goldblum said, with his usual meditative calm, avoiding the obvious apocalyptic humor and urging the audience to be mindful of the reality of Trump’s victory. For a second, Goldblum seemed to be suggesting viewers think about the world outside of the show’s bubble. But the rest of the show, after the news of Trump’s impending victory took hold, felt like bizarre floundering— and comedy didn’t seem like a useful outlet. The Daily Show host Trevor Noah was also doing a live show on election night, and he was similarly sober, bemoaning the moment but entreating his audience not to give into fear.

Just after midnight, Colbert tried to wrap things up, to offer a sweeping, comforting conclusion on a night of extreme uncertainty. “By every metric, we are more divided than ever as a nation,” he said. “We overdosed especially this year. We drank too much of the poison. You take a little of it so you can hate the other side ... above all, we as a nation agree that we should never ever have another election like this one.” It was a nice sentiment but it felt hollow—too clean a conclusion as the country looks to an unclear future with a President Trump in the White House. “The election is over. You survived,” Colbert added. Then, the camera cut to his bandleader, Jon Batiste, an African American jazz musician from Louisiana, whose expression seemed locked in fear. Colbert’s efforts to conclude things neatly weren’t necessarily resonating with everyone.

The future of American late-night comedy (almost all of which is tilted left) will hinge on how it reacts to a Trump administration. After years of never showing more than mild irreverence for the Democratic White House, can hosts return to the more aggressive, angry, and politically charged days of the Bush era? Or has the polarization of this recent battle made that approach seem futile? At the moment when things began to depart from conventional wisdom and toward Trump, Colbert appeared drained of energy. Perhaps his election-night special was just a snapshot of a strange time in political history. But it also marked a hopelessness, a sense of defeat, and a necessary moment of reckoning that might echo for years to come.

The U.S. Election Through International Headlines

Americans weren’t the only ones following the U.S. presidential campaign. Since the 2016 election first kicked off nearly 600 days ago, the world has been closely watching too.

Here’s what election day looked like to the rest of the world through their headlines on November 8, 2016:

Argentina’s Clarín: “Hillary and Trump, Ready for a Dramatic End in a Divided Country”

Newseum

Australia’s The Australian

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Brazil’s O Globo: “Hillary and Trump Fight to the End”

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Canada’s The Globe and Mail

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France’s 20 Minutes: “Once Again America”

Newseum

Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel: “American Pollsters Warn of Surprises”

Newseum

Israel’s Haaretz: “America to Choose Trump or Clinton”

Newseum

Lebanon’s Al Mustaqbal : “The American People Will Decide On the Presidency Today”

Newseum

Mexico’s La Razón: “Populism Versus Establishment”

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Pakistan’s The News International

Newseum

Philippines’s Manila Bulletin

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South Africa’s The Witness

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Spain’s El País: “The World Holds its Breath While the United States Votes”

Newseum

United Arab Emirates’s Khaleej Times

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United Kingdom’s The Guardian

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The Poetry of CNN's Election-Day Chyrons

It’s hard to be a news network on a news day that is, until the poll returns come in, such a relatively slow one. CNN, with the chyrons it used to announce the day’s news as its pundits talked, did its best—often with quite poetic results.

BREAKING NEWS

SOON.

ELECTION DAY

JUST HOURS AWAY

FROM FIRST ELECTION RESULTS.

TRUMP: ‘I’VE DECIDED TO VOTE FOR MYSELF’

JUDGE RULES AGAINST TRUMP CAMP IN NEVADA VOTING DISPUTE.

ELECTION NIGHT IN AMERICA

TRUMP: REPORTS OF REPUBLICAN VOTES SWITCHED TO DEM

TRUMP TWEET MISTAKENLY ALLGUES NATIONWIDE VOTING ISSUES

FIRST EXIT POLL RESULTS 46 MIN 12 SEC

BREAKING NEWS

SOON

JUST HOURS AWAY FROM FIRST ELECTION RESULTS.

TWO ELECTION WORKERS FIRED FROM BROWARD COUNTY, FLORIDA

CLINTON FIGHTS TO HOLD OFF TRUMP IN KEY STATE OF PA

EARLY VOTING SPIKES AMONG LATINOS IN 3 KEY STATES

SOON: FIRST CNN EXIT POLLING

JUST HOURS AWAY FROM FIRST ELECTION RESULTS.

TAG YOUR ELECTION DAY INSTAGRAMS

#MYVOTE

BREAKING NEWS: VOTING UNDER WAY ACROSS U.S.

JUST HOURS AWAY FROM FIRST ELECTION RESULTS

FACT.

INTERNET GOES WILD OVER PHOTO OF TRUMP AND MELANIA VOTING

HUNDREDS FLOCK TO SUSAN B. ANTHONY’S GRAVE ON ELECTION DAY

FIVE STATES VOTING ON WHETHER TO LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

First polls close in 1:45:00

FACT.

JUST HOURS AWAY FROM FIRST ELECTION RESULTS

FIRST EXIT POLL RESULTS 27 MIN 28 SEC

FACT:

2016

JUDGE RULES AGAINST TRUMP CAMP

IN NEVADA VOTING DISPUTE

Kayleigh McEnany / Conservative Columnist

Kayleigh McEnany / Trump Supporter

BREAKING NEWS

SOON: FIRST CNN EXIST POLLING

FIRST EXIT POLL RESULTS 17 MIN 45 SEC

BREAKING NEWS

SOON

Michael Nutter / Clinton Supporter

Michael Nutter / Former Philadelphia Mayor

FIRST EXIT POLL RESULTS 12 MIN 45 SEC

Both campaigns are holding their watch parties in midtown Manhattan.

Virginia officials describe turnout as “way” up and “robust.”

Judge rejects trump lawsuit over early voting hours in Clark County, NV.

Utah officials reporting voting machine problems across the state.

FIRST EXIT POLL RESULTS 7 MIN 13 SEC

SOON: FIRST CNN EXIT POLLING

BREAKING NEWS

SOON

TAG YOUR ELECTION DAY INSTAGRAMS

#MYVOTE

Andre Bauer / Former Lieutenant Gov. of South Carolina

BREAKING NEWS: CLINTON MOTORCADE LEACING FOR NYC

BREAKING NEWS

SOON

FIRST POLLS CLOSE: 52 MIN 25 SEC

FIRST POLLS CLOSE: 48 MIN 37 SEC

FIRST POLLS CLOSE: 40 MIN 21 SEC

BREAKING NEWS

BREAKING NEWS

BREAKING NEWS

SOON.

Donald Trump’s Dystopias

It started in August 2015, two months after Donald Trump officially launched his candidacy for President of the United States. Jon Lovett, who spent three years as a speechwriter in the Obama White House, wrote a “dispatch from the future” for The Atlantic on what President Trump’s election might look like, detailing “the budget crisis, President Trump’s impeachment, Vice President Cruz’s inauguration, the second budget crisis. It’s all pretty straightforward. It was a painful and frightening time, to be sure.”

Since then, many more writers have been compelled to sketch out their visions of a Trump presidency, and while their scenarios have differed when it comes to specifics, all of them fit neatly into the category of dystopian fiction. From mass deportations to child soldiers fighting wars with Mexico to a nation whose only news source is the Trump Network, these speculative portraits of the future take the candidate’s documented policy proposals and consider what they might actually look like if enacted. That the results are so grim, so Orwellian even, seems to reinforce how unique this election is, and how far Trump’s language and pronouncements have deviated from the norm of politics in the U.S.

Dystopian stories, Laura Miller wrote in The New Yorker in 2010, have one ultimate purpose: “to warn us about the dangers of some current trend.” Books like Brave New World and 1984, she explains, “detail the consequences of political authoritarianism and feckless hedonism. This is what happens if we don’t turn back now, they scold, and scolding makes sense when your readers have a shot at getting their hands on the wheel.”

In that sense, speculative fiction provides a framework for mapping out the future. And it resonates particularly in a moment when reality already seems to be pervaded with a sense of fear, with everything from police shootings to cyber warfare to climate change tainting hopes for the future. In April, The Boston Globe surprised its readers with a mock front page dated April 9, 2017, that laid out some potential news items from a Trump presidency. “Deportations to begin,” read the top story, followed by smaller headlines about Trump’s attack on libel laws, his trade war with China, his orders to kill the families of ISIS members, his appointment of Omarosa Manigault as education secretary, and his renaming of Yellowstone as Trump National Park. “This is Donald Trump’s America,” an editor’s note read in the bottom left corner. “What you read on this page is what might happen if the GOP front-runner can put his ideas into practice.”

That’s what makes the Globe’s front page so disturbing—it’s simply a manifestation of policy proposals the candidate has actually made. Fusion’s vision of “Trump’s American Dystopia,” published a few days after the Globe mockup, does the same thing. It imagines what the candidate’s statements regarding Muslims and undocumented immigrants might look like in practice. On January 21, 2017, it details, Trump signs an executive order banning Muslims from the U.S., prompting unprecedented antagonism and terror threats from the Middle East, a flood of lawsuits, and the cancellation of 10 percent of flights to the U.S.

In Fusion’s story, this soon leads to mandatory national identity cards for Muslims, followed by #DeportationNation, in which Trump begins to round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants. There are public raids across the country, and 2,400 new facilities are established where undocumented residents are detained. “The Times reports that many of the camps lack sufficient food and medical care,” the story explains. An organized resistance forms, called the Mockingjay Alliance, presumably in homage to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy—the most influential work of dystopian fiction in the past decade.

It’s hard to consider what’s more realistic: that a resistance group in the U.S. would name itself after a resistance group made immortal in a Jennifer Lawrence movie, or that President Trump might move forward with his professed intention to deport every single undocumented immigrant in the country. Either way, the nods to popular culture add a sense of absurdism to a bleak vision of America. This mashup of surreal humor and plausibility also permeates “The Arctic Lizard,” a short story by the Israeli author Etgar Keret published by BuzzFeed in October. In Keret’s story, set an unspecified amount of time after President Trump’s third term, a bloody war with Mexico has led to the founding of the 14+, a unit of the military staffed with soldiers aged 14 and over. One of its key recruiting tools is the game Destromon Go (based on Pokemon Go), which offers special collectors’ characters only available to people fighting in war zones.

Keret’s vision of the future is the most outlandish, the most stylized, and the most explicitly dystopian. By contrast, the Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott is much more measured in his speculative essay about what President Trump might mean for the arts in America. It starts quietly, with some characteristic outrage from the new President when a sculpture of him sitting on the toilet is unveiled in a gallery in Chelsea. Trump derides the artist as lazy, and “a loser.” But then he launches hearings on public funding for the arts, threatening to withdraw funding for the Smithsonian Institute and the National Gallery of Art. Soon, major organizations sanitize their offerings so as not to offend President Trump. By the summer of 2018, the biggest cultural draw of the year is Death Wish VII: Border Wars, a remake of the Charles Bronson series that coincides with mass deportations in Texas and Arizona. Libel suits are filed against a publisher that prints works of satire based on the Trump presidency, creating new questions as to whether works of fiction can be legally libelous.

Kennicott’s scenario speaks to the ways in which art plays a vital role in a democracy, and to a large extent, these fictional accounts of America under Trump’s rule act as works of protest. But they’re also thought experiments that pay considered attention to the proposals of a candidate who’s frequently attracted more attention for his personality than his policies. “Dystopian literature lets us simulate our worst imaginings from the privacy of our own homes,” the author John Scalzi wrote in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times on November 4:

No need to actually live in a world where overpopulation has crashed the planet when Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! shows it’s not something we’d want. No need to live in a world of biological terror when Stephen King’s The Stand already lets you tour the carnage. Nuclear annihilation, the collapse of society, religious or political tyrannies — whatever you fear, science fiction gives you a chance to see it followed to its logical and horrible extreme, so you can say, “Well, now I know I don’t want that.”

In that sense, each of these works has offered Trump’s own visions for his presidency rendered in different scales of realism. The question now is how speculative they’ll be allowed to remain.