february 2000

You can teach old journalists the occasional new trick, but two? Forget it.

The 2016 election persuaded the press to avoid publicly presuming that Donald Trump will lose and the Democrat will win. The very cautious news coverage about Joe Biden’s chances, despite his formidable advantage in polls, makes this plain.

But even though reporters are loath to say that the president is a serious underdog, they are repeating another 2016 error. Trump is getting off easy for a series of recent scandals, most likely because press outlets have concluded that he is doomed and that coverage is largely pointless. From a radical reorganization of the civil service to sketchy Chinese bank accounts, the president has faced little scrutiny on what should be major topics of concern for voters.

Press play on a video by the comedian Sarah Cooper, and you know what to expect: Cooper in a blazer, lip-synching to something nonsensical that President Donald Trump has said, her exaggerated facial expressions highlighting the absurdity of his comments. These bite-size, viral impersonations, created on TikTok and popularized on Twitter, have launched her to online fame since she began posting them in April, garnering her millions of followers, a guest-hosting gig for Jimmy Kimmel, and a deal with Netflix to create a special. In a year when comedians have had to cancel stand-up shows and adapt to performing without live audiences, Cooper’s meteoric rise is remarkable. When we spoke in May, she sounded stunned by her success. “My impostor syndrome is kicking in,” she told me then. “I’m like, ‘Wait, I didn’t actually write anything.’”

The president’s response to the pandemic should not have been a surprise. In December 2016, a month before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I asked how a pandemic would play out during his term. The question was not idly put: Every recent president before Trump had been challenged by epidemics, and Trump’s actions as both a citizen during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and a candidate on the campaign trail had been troubling. His record suggested that come a pandemic, he would lie, spread misinformation, opt for travel bans in lieu of more effective measures, and heed his own counsel over that of experts.

In the 2020 election, on top of every routine test of character and capability, the candidates must answer the challenge the coronavirus has brought to this country. Trump’s response has been so lax as to effectively cede the country to a virus whose spread is controllable. He has, by his own admission, repeatedly downplayed the threat after he became aware of how dangerous the new coronavirus could be. He caught the virus himself and seems to have learned nothing from the encounter.

Sometime in early to mid-November, if October polling holds and the infrastructure of our democracy basically functions, Joe Biden is likely to be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. At that point, he will have just more than two months to prepare to take over the leadership of a country still in the grips of a once-in-a-century pandemic, with more than 12 million Americans unemployed, tens of millions of children out of school, and COVID-19 deaths barreling toward 300,000.

Transitions can be challenging even under the best circumstances. And President Donald Trump, to say the least, may not be psychologically or temperamentally predisposed to a thoughtful, well-planned transition. Even back when he was the incoming president, his on-ramp to the presidency was extraordinarily haphazard, disorganized, and incomplete. Add in his petulance and expected fury at the outcome, and there is surely reason to fear the havoc the president and his team could wreak on their way to the exits.

Massachusetts is one of the smallest, but most densely populated, states, with a population of nearly 6.9 million. From the Berkshires through the Pioneer Valley to Boston, out to Cape Cod and the Islands, here are a few glimpses of the landscape of Massachusetts, and some of the wildlife and people calling it home.

This photo story is part of Fifty, a collection of images from each of the United States.

An earlier version of this photo essay misidentified the location of one of the photos. The caption has been corrected.