Susan Glasser: “If there is any lesson to take from the past few years of American politics, it is that things can always get worse.”
“This is worth remembering as Washington begins another fall of self-made and yet painfully real crises—the political prologue to a 2024 campaign season unlike any other, as the ex-President turned criminal defendant Donald Trump threatens to return to the White House after challenging core tenets of our democracy. The word ‘unprecedented’ is no longer sufficient. We’ve run out of synonyms, analogies, and time to escape the mess.”
“The questions now are of a different sort, about the exact details of what we will face and when. To wit, as Congress returned from its protracted summer recess, the Trumpified, radicalized House Republican Conference was preparing to shut down the federal government when funding runs out at the end of this month and to impeach President Biden, both for no apparent reason. Speaker Kevin McCarthy has a majority so slim that he’s effectively a prisoner of his party’s most reckless extremists.”
