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At The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg looks back at the wreckage of Trump’s presidency:
Most consequentially, Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of reality. Other presidents sneered at the truth; a senior Bush official, widely believed to be Karl Rove, famously derided the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind.
But Trump’s ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist, after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that the war was a disaster.
No such consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves behind a nation deranged.
Eugene Robinson argues similarly that a return to normal is a far way off:
President Trump will soon be gone — but, tragically, not forgotten. His campaign to comfort his bruised ego and reinforce his precious “brand” by disputing his election loss long past the bitter end means his legacy will poison our politics long past Inauguration Day.
Logic and reason matter because our democratic processes worked well enough to put Joe Biden in the White House. But these qualities won’t restore normalcy because Trump requires his loyal supporters to ignore them. Volume and passion matter in Trumpworld. Argument and arithmetic do not.
At The Nation, John Nichols previews what Republicans will do in Congress in 2021:
Logic and practicalities tell us that the partisan dead-enders who have cast their lot with defeated President Donald Trump will fail in their final desperate bid to overturn the election results, and that Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. Yet getting from here to there will be far more difficult than it should be because Trump’s grip on the Republican Party remains so tight that supposedly mainstream Republicans will continue to embrace his fever-dream fantasies of “voter fraud” and “election irregularities.”
As such, they are determined to disregard the mandate Biden earned in an election that was not, by any measure, close.
On a final note, David Graham at The Atlantic profiles Bill Barr’s legacy:
Nonetheless, Trump’s split with Barr echoes his falling-out with Sessions before his first attorney general’s departure two years ago. Neither man deserves much praise for doing the bare minimum of resisting some of Trump’s abuses, but their departures are interesting because no Cabinet secretaries have been as effective at carrying out Trump’s agenda as Sessions and Barr. In an executive branch filled with third-rate government apparatchiks and incompetent private-sector imports, Sessions and Barr were experienced in Washington and knew what to do. Beyond that, they were closely aligned with Trump ideologically, yet both left more or less unceremoniously. […]
Even though they had done so much to advance the president’s cause, they were ultimately loyal to their own politics and not, as he demanded, to him personally. It is tempting to say that Sessions and Barr were both Trumpists avant la lettre, but their eventual conflicts with him show there was no such thing: Trumpism is a cult of personality, and policy is always an afterthought.
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