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.

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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.

“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.

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).”

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.”

Over the past 19 months, we have all heard a lot about Bill Barr’s misuse of the office of attorney general and the resources of the Justice Department to do the personal bidding of President Donald Trump, to undermine the evenhanded rule of law, and to work in countless other ways to put the president in a position of nearly autocratic power. What first came to our attention as surprising accounts of specific actions out of sync with the way attorneys general are supposed to act has become a systematic torrent of actions building on one another to feed a rising crescendo of public alarm.

This unprecedented pattern of conduct by the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer has brought a question to the minds of many people: Why does Bill Barr do the things he does?

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.

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This election could be the one that breaks America, Barton Gellman warns in our November cover story. Given its magnitude, we published the piece early online; read it now.

Bart and I caught up over email to discuss the ways America’s election mechanisms might break down entirely.

The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: So what happens if President Trump refuses to concede the election?

Barton Gellman: I don’t think it’s a question of “if.” Unless Trump scores a legitimate win in the Electoral College, everything we know about him says he will refuse to accept defeat and use every tool at his disposal to undo the result.

In April 2018, I spoke with Bill Gates about two near certainties—that the world would eventually face a serious pandemic and that it was not prepared for one. Even then, Gates acknowledged that this was the rare scenario that punctured his trademark optimism about global progress. “My general narrative is: Hey, we’re making great progress and we just need to accelerate it,” he told me. “Here, I’m bringing more of: Hey, you thought this was bad? [You should] really feel bad.”

Two years after that conversation, COVID-19 has infected at least 31 million people around the world. The confirmed death toll is nearing 1 million. Both numbers are likely underestimates. The annual “Goalkeepers Report” from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is usually a hopeful account of an improving world, is instead a litany of loss. The global economy will decline by at least $12 trillion by the end of 2021. About 37 million people have already been pushed into extreme poverty. Twenty-five years of progress in vaccine coverage have disappeared in 25 weeks.

Updated at 12:40 p.m. ET on September 24, 2020

David Jay is the oldest of 12 cousins on one side of his family and the third-oldest of 24 cousins on the other. As a kid, family to Jay meant having a lot of people around, a feeling of community, and crucially, a sense of permanence, that these people would always be in his life. Later, as an adult living in collective housing, he could access the feeling of family with those around him, but the permanence was gone. His roommates started finding romantic partners, having children, and dispersing. Jay had always wanted his own family with kids—and had known, for almost as long, that he wouldn’t be able to build one the usual way.

Jay is the founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network and one of the most prominent people in the asexual movement. (Asexual people, or aces, don’t experience sexual attraction, though many do have sex and form romantic relationships.) After starting AVEN as a freshman at Wesleyan University in 2001, Jay spent years explaining asexuality to the public, speaking at events and talking to the press. As he grew older, the questions on his mind moved beyond identity and attraction to issues of parenting and family life.