Illustrations by Guillem Casasús / Renderings by Borja Alegre

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.

To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.

The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

Yesterday, after weeks of reports about political interference in the efforts of government scientists and public-health experts to inform Americans about the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, directly addressed the two Trump-administration officials at the center of the recent controversy: Michael Caputo, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, and Caputo’s former science adviser, Paul Alexander, who attempted to censor what scientists, including Fauci, said about the coronavirus.

“Caputo enabled Alexander,” Fauci told me over email. “Alexander is the one who directly tried to influence the CDC (he may have succeeded, I cannot really say) and even me (I told him to go take a hike).”

“I’m used to bullies.”

That’s a line Joe Biden has used several times during his run against Donald Trump, and he said it again recently in talking about the first presidential debate.

“I hope I don’t take the bait, because he’s going to say awful things about me, my family, et cetera,” Biden said at a virtual fundraiser. “I hope I don’t get baited into getting into a brawl with this guy, because that’s the only place he’s comfortable.” Biden expects to be able to keep his cool because, he said, “I’m used to dealing with bullies.”

The challenge for Biden isn’t simply that he’ll be facing a bully on the debate stage in Cleveland on Tuesday; it’s that he’ll be facing a man who is shameless and without conscience, a shatterer of norms and boundaries, a liar of epic proportions, a conspiracy-monger who inhabits an alternate reality. President Donald Trump operates outside any normal parameters.

It was only a matter of time, really. Ever since Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland four years ago, progressives have argued that Democrats need to wrest back control of the Supreme Court by packing it full of liberal justices. By the Democratic primary last year, the idea had gone relatively mainstream, and half of the presidential candidates expressed openness to it. Now, in the five days since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, calls from the left to pack the court have reached a volume that will be difficult for party leaders to ignore. Democrats have few options to try to prevent President Donald Trump from confirming his nominee, whom he plans to announce on Saturday. So they’re already gaming out how to get revenge.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of the The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.

Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump was asked about whether there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Trump replied—well, it was a bit hard to tell. Trump’s critics heard the president saying he wanted to throw out votes and wouldn’t relinquish power. His defenders conceded that he sounded stupid but simply meant that he intended to win.

That created a day of controversy, as pundits and fact-checkers tried to sort through Trumpian world salad and figure out what he said and what it meant.

This is no way to run a functioning democracy, but it is—if you believe Jared Kushner—all part of the president’s plan. As Bob Woodward explained to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg Thursday at The Atlantic Festival, Kushner (who is both a senior adviser and son-in-law to the president) believes these controversies benefit the president by amplifying his talking points.

Two years ago, most Americans knew nothing about QAnon, the ever-growing, diffuse, and violent movement devoted to a loosely connected set of conspiracy theories, most of which tie back to the idea that Donald Trump is leading a holy war against a high-powered cabal of child traffickers, some of whom drink blood. But at the time, it was a massive problem on Reddit, where conspiracy-minded members of the Trump-themed subreddit r/The_Donald had long stoked theories such as Pizzagate, and where a QAnon subreddit called r/TheGreatAwakening had racked up 70,000 subscribers, some of whom posted hundreds of times.

Last week, new polling showed that nearly half of Americans have now heard of QAnon. But on Reddit, the movement no longer has any meaningful presence.

Last week, at the White House Conference on American History, President Donald Trump denounced the way “the left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies,” attacking Howard Zinn, critical race theory, and The New York Times’ 1619 Project (to which I was a contributor). The president emphasized the need for “patriotic education” in our schools, and seemed to downplay the centrality of slavery, and perhaps any sort of oppression, to America’s founding.

“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” Trump said at the event. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

The first minutes of 76 Days are an intrusion into a moment so private, it practically begs the viewer to look away: A medical worker in a hazmat suit is dragged through the halls of a hospital in China, crying out for one last chance to say goodbye to her dead father, an early victim of COVID-19. Her co-workers, also in head-to-toe protective gear, are a terrifying sight. But they speak to her kindly, urging her to regain her composure because they need her to get back to work alongside them. The scene combines science-fiction spectacle with harrowing drama, and it’s both unwatchable and utterly compelling.

76 Days, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, is the first significant piece of cinema made about the coronavirus pandemic. The documentary focuses on four different hospitals in Wuhan, China, the city where the disease was first identified. The story brings the audience into the eerie, empty corridors of a locked-down building in a locked-down city and strings together abstract glimpses of the staff’s battle against a resilient and dangerous illness. But the movie is also fascinating simply because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end—a jarring contrast to America’s experience with COVID-19, which feels as though it will last forever.

All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.

You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.

On April 13, Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on the Today show and assured viewers that the worst was nearly behind us. It had been a month since the last gathering of fans in an NBA arena; a month since the fateful week when Americans began panic-buying bottled water and canned beans. The segment’s host, Savannah Guthrie, was broadcasting from home in upstate New York. With the light of a makeshift camera reflecting in her glasses, she asked Redfield to address reports that we could be facing another three weeks of social distancing. “We are nearing the peak right now,” Redfield told her. “Clearly we are stabilizing in terms of the state of this outbreak.”