july/august 2001

Updated at 11:06 p.m. ET on October 30, 2020.

On paper, Sloane, a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut, seems almost unbelievably well prepared to shepherd her three daughters through the roiling world of competitive youth sports. She played tennis and ran track in high school and has an advanced degree in behavioral medicine. She wrote her master’s thesis on the connection between increased aerobic activity and attention span. She is also versed in statistics, which comes in handy when she’s analyzing her eldest daughter’s junior-squash rating—and whiteboarding the consequences if she doesn’t step up her game. “She needs at least a 5.0 rating, or she’s going to Ohio State,” Sloane told me.

Casting a ballot by Election Day is just the first thing Americans have to worry about. What if President Donald Trump and his allies stop the counting of ballots, or delay vote certification until Republican state legislatures can play hanky-panky with the electors? What if civil war breaks out? “We’ll take to the streets,” Joe Biden supporters tell one another. Isn’t that what people do?

Protesting is certainly what a lot of people will think of doing, and will do. It’s what Protect the Results, a coalition of more than 100 grassroots groups, is recommending, at least for now. Of the more than a dozen election-protection organizations that have popped up over the past two months, Protect the Results is probably the best-known. As of this writing, you can find more than 450 events around the country on its website, many scheduled for the day after the election. I signed up for one in New York City and got an email telling me to be ready to report to an address on Fifth Avenue on November 4 in the “highly likely” event that national protests will be necessary.

The human brain makes decisions in two basic modes. One is analytic, which involves carefully weighing costs and benefits and choosing the best option. The other mode is intuitive: doing what feels right. Both have their merits. Intuitive thinking allows us to make split-second decisions. It helps guide our romantic lives and our lunchtime sandwich choices. But it is not the mode that should inform a strategic response to a pandemic.

Even casual observers of President Donald Trump’s mode of thinking long ago abandoned hope that he might embrace analytic reasoning (sometimes referred to simply as “science”). But if there were ever a possibility that he might at least come to terms with the power of the coronavirus, it would have been when it sent him to the hospital. Barely a month ago, recall, we had cause to speculate that the president might soon be dead. Although details of Trump’s illness remain concealed—including abnormalities in his chest CT scan and the date that he first tested positive for the virus—the known facts of his case indicate that it was not mild. He received supplemental oxygen to keep his red blood cells saturated, and he was prescribed dexamethasone, which is recommended only in serious cases.

Kurtis, a young accountant in McKinney, Texas, likes the thing that many people hate about Donald Trump: that the president has left the pandemic response almost entirely up to local officials.

“He left it up to each state to make their own decision on how they wanted to proceed,” Kurtis told me recently. Most experts think the absence of a national strategy for tackling the coronavirus has been a disaster. But Kurtis argues that North Dakota, for example, shouldn’t have to follow the same rules as New York City. Kurtis voted for Trump in 2016, and he plans to do so again this year.

Some 82 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s coronavirus response—a higher percentage than before the president was diagnosed with the virus. This is despite the fact that more than 220,000 Americans have died, and virtually every public-health expert, including those who have worked for Republican administrations, says the president has performed abysmally.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is one of those patriotic Americans who went to work in the Trump White House, only to come soaring back over the gates, rejected by the host organism. Like many before her, she decided to write a book about her experiences, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, and she proffers it to us as an act of public service, although possibly also as a comprehensive case for the defense if this whole acid trip ends up at The Hague. She is another member of Plastic Camelot, the ever-changing group of personal friends, celebrities, and weirdos whom the Trumps bring close to them and then, in the manner of bored kings, dispatch to the tombs. Maybe they’re no more disturbing a collection of advisers and jesters than the men and women on whom other presidents have depended. Who’s to say that Omarosa is so much worse than Henry Kissinger? She certainly has a better record on human rights.