The Garden of Forking Paths
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He’s back. How should we deal with it? And how can we respond to the return of Donald Trump with more personal resilience and smarter political resistance?
Exactly eight years ago, in January 2017, my life developed a strange rhythm: Trump tweeted—and a few minutes later, my phone started buzzing. With every bizarre half-baked post, whether it was about “ General E. Watch,” the infamous middle-of-the-night “covfefe,” or his various threats against the press and his political opponents, his fingers furiously raced across his iPhone and moments later, the BBC or other news outlets would ask me for a rapid response interview as part of its breaking news coverage.
This caught me off guard; I had unintentionally developed a depressingly relevant area of expertise for the rise of Trumpism. On the one hand, I had worked in US campaign politics—I helped manage a winning campaign for governor of Minnesota—so I understood some of the complex contours of American politics.
