Atlantic October difficulty: Trump’s antidemocratic actions

For its October 2024 difficulty, The Atlantic seems to the presidential election with a bundle of tales––and a hanging cowl illustration––inspecting Donald Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies. Articles cowl the Republican politicians who bent simply to Trump’s will, and the threats {that a} second Trump time period poses, with reporting by Tim Alberta, Anne Applebaum, Mark Leibovich, Helen Lewis, Elaina Plott Calabro, Hanna Rosin, and Sarah Zhang. Tales are publishing this week and subsequent; please attain out with any questions or requests to interview The Atlantic’s writers on their reporting.

On the duvet: The illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visible language of outdated Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to painting a circus wagon on its ominous method to a defiled Capitol. One thing Depraved This Method Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a selected inspiration. We imagine this to be the primary cowl bearing no headline or typography in The Atlantic’s 167-year historical past.

Main the bundle, and on-line as we speak, is Mark Leibovich’s “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.” Again in 2015, when Trump first sought the Republican Occasion’s nomination, he boasted to Leibovich that he would simply bend Republicans to his will. “They may communicate badly about me now, however they received’t later,” Trump stated. However politicians had been weak, Trump stated, in contrast to the “brutal, vicious killers” he handled within the enterprise world—they had been pathetic “puppets” who, Trump stated, would undergo him. “It is going to be very simple,” Trump stated.

To Leibovich and nearly anybody who’d hung out round politics, this seemed like empty bombast. However Trump turned out to be proper. He “rolled over” his Republican opponents, gleefully humiliating them alongside the way in which. When he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, celebration elders equivalent to Mitch McConnell assured those that Republican establishments had been sturdy sufficient to resist Trump. “He’s not going to alter the essential philosophy of the celebration,” McConnell stated. Looking back, this was hilarious.

Republican leaders know full nicely who Trump is; in spite of everything, most of them condemned him fulsomely. But as we speak, even after he misplaced the presidency in 2020, Trump dominates the GOP and has remade it in his picture. His household controls the celebration equipment. Regardless of understanding higher, Republican politicians––together with many who as soon as stated that Trump would destroy the celebration––march in lockstep obeisance to him, kissing his ring and even imitating his sartorial fashion. “If Trump had a mustache,” Leibovich writes, “his acolytes would all develop and groom one identical to his—as Baath celebration loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.”

The celebration’s prostration earlier than Trump is complete; the hole between what the GOP traditionally espoused and what it now permits itself to abide is big. A once-serious celebration has been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of no matter its convictions as soon as had been. And all of this, Leibovich wonders, to what finish

Already revealed: Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Kash Patel, “The Man Who Will Do Something for Trump,” seems into Patel’s distinctive devotion to Trump throughout his presidency, and the way Patel is the kind of particular person Trump is more likely to flip to in a second time period.

The difficulty continues The Atlantic’s essential reporting on the 2024 election, which incorporates the “If Trump Wins” cowl bundle for the January/February 2024 difficulty. “If Trump Wins” featured essays by two dozen Atlantic writers on the implications of a attainable second Trump presidency, and was not too long ago translated into Spanish.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com