Corby Kummer

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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Yesterday, strong winds and rainstorms pushed water levels in Venice, Italy, to the second-highest levels ever recorded. The high-water mark hit 74 inches (187 centimeters), just short of the record set in 1966. This exceptional acqua alta has flooded businesses and historic structures, sank boats, and been blamed for one death so far.

On the second day of the impeachment proceedings, President Donald Trump couldn’t control himself on Twitter: He lashed out at Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was subjected to a smear campaign, and who testified to that effect before the House Intelligence Committee. Trump’s lack of control, in itself, was not unusual. But, for some reason, Trump showed more restraint 24 hours earlier, when William Taylor and George Kent went before the Committee. It was almost as if the president found himself triggered by Yovanovitch, the 61-year-old career diplomat. But why was the president’s response so different to witnesses who were roughly saying the same thing? What was the big difference between Kent and Taylor and Yovanovitch? All three are career diplomats, all three are Ivy League graduates, all three have worked in the State Department, all three are experts in Ukraine. But only one of them is a woman. Could that be why the president singled out Yovanovitch? It is almost as if the president is unable to control his rage against women. It is almost as if the president thinks he can bully women and silence them.

HONG KONG—For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests would end soon. They’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October was supposed to slow protesters down, but the very first day after that ban, I watched streams of protesters in masks and helmets make their way to their usual haunts on Hong Kong Island.

The government shut down many of the subway lines that day, a practice that has become a de facto curfew, because Hong Kong’s über-efficient subway system is the way most people get around. No matter; the protesters ended up walking, sometimes a lot, and I walked with them, asking some of the same questions I had asked for months: Do you think you will continue protesting? What would it take for you to stop?

Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. What would it be like to live through such a change? We’d all be pulled toward the floor; many buildings would collapse; birds would fall from the sky; the Earth would move closer to the sun, reestablishing orbit in a far hotter zone.

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Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.

The first day of public hearings into the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump included an explosive revelation. William B. Taylor Jr., the senior American diplomat in Ukraine, tied Trump even more directly than we previously knew to the effort to pressure Ukraine to probe his political opponent.

But as damaging as Taylor’s testimony proved, it was merely another massive boulder in the avalanche of evidence against the president. We are well beyond the point that any disinterested person can deny that the president abused his power and acted in a corrupt manner, in ways the American founders explicitly warned against.

That the president acted the way he did should surprise exactly no one, given his disordered personality and Nietzschean ethic, his pathological lying and brutishness and bullying, and his history of personal and professional depravity. The president is a deeply damaged human being—and therefore a deeply dangerous president.

Studies of contemporary public opinion have shown that if most people know one thing about conservatives’ ideas about the Constitution, it is that they stand on the rock of originalism—the proposition that judges should read the Constitution by the lights of the nation’s Founders.

While there have been some laudable exceptions, many originalists at the country’s top law schools have steered clear of the broader Donald Trump phenomenon, in the meantime taking deep dives into hermeneutic linguistic theory and 18th-century understandings of words such as commerce and emoluments, and phrases such as public use and well-regulated militia.

But outside of legal academia, many conservative scholars—the Claremont McKenna College government professor Charles Kesler; the Saint Vincent College politics professor Bradley C. S. Watson; the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics director and AWC Family Foundation fellow at the Heritage Foundation David Azerrad; the Johns Hopkins University political-science lecturer Ken Masugi; the Hillsdale College lecturer Michael Anton; the Hillsdale politics professor Thomas G. West; the Amherst College professor emeritus of American institutions and director of the James Wilson Institute Hadley Arkes; and legions of others—have embraced, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Trump, a man who would have been the Founders’ worst nightmare, and the antithesis of every Christian or civic value and virtue that conservatives have purported to champion. The white evangelical segment of the electorate agrees: As Emma Green wrote in The Atlantic earlier this week, white evangelicals have expressed unwavering support for the president, and many say there is nothing he could do that would cause them to reconsider. Many commentators have explained this embrace as crassly transactional: Conservatives, they say, accept Trump because he will appoint their judges, or roll back regulations they hate.

Remember these numbers. You’ll be asked about them at the end of the test: 70, 73, 76, and 78.

These are the ages of the leading candidates in the 2020 presidential election: Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. In most any other line of work, people in their eighth decade are usually retired. For most of human history—and still in most of the world today—people of this age were usually dead.

Last month, Jimmy Carter, the 95-year-old former U.S. president, said that the office requires a person “to be very flexible with [one’s] mind,” and that by age 80 he wouldn’t have felt able to do the job. He joined the growing ranks of those suggesting they would support an upper age limit for the office, either for purposes of breaking up the gerontocracy or to ensure a person has the physical and cognitive capacity. “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way,” Carter said.

In the pursuit of new knowledge, some scientists explore other worlds, discover new species, and develop cures for disease. Others film themselves being robbed by a colleague in a King Kong suit, to address a debate that’s been raging for more than 40 years.

Bedecked in ape cosplay, Satoshi Hirata from Kyoto University would grab a stone from his uncostumed colleague, Fumihiro Kano, and hide it under one of two boxes, all while Kano watched in mock indignation. Then, after Kano ducked behind a door, “Kong” would surreptitiously move the stolen stone to the second box. The duo filmed these shenanigans and then showed the videos to several chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. They wanted to know how what the apes made of the scene. Specifically, when Kano returned and began looking for his stone, which box did the apes think he’d search first?

President Donald Trump has exercised his authority to intervene in three cases involving war crimes, on the side of the alleged war criminals. He pardoned one serviceman who was convicted of heinous crimes, and another awaiting trial for heinous crimes. He also reversed the demotion of a Navy SEAL convicted of taking trophy pictures with an enemy corpse. All were brought to justice by their fellow servicemen and women; each prosecution relied on testimony from servicemen in the same units who witnessed the war crimes and reported them to military superiors.

This makes Trump the first commander in chief in memory to pardon American servicemen for violent crimes committed in uniform. The justification can be found in a statement Trump made to NBC News in 2016: “You have to play the game the way they are playing the game.” That is, the U.S. should operate the way terrorists operate.