And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office. From the account in The Hollywood Reporter:
Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all—100 percent—came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.
This is “news,” in its detail, just as the specifics of Weinstein’s marauding were real, hard-won news. But it also is an open secret. This is the man who offered himself to the public over the past two-and-a-half years.
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I feel this way because I believe I chronicled signs of every one of these traits through the campaign cycle, in The Atlantic’s 162-installment “Trump Time Capsule” series. But practically anyone else in political journalism can make a similar claim. Who and what Trump is has been an open secret.
It was because of this open secret that nearly 11 million more Americans voted against Trump last year than for him, including the three million more who voted for Hillary Clinton. (The rest were for Gary Johnson, who got nearly 4.5 million; Jill Stein, with nearly 1.5 million; Evan McMullin, with about 700,000; and a million-plus write-ins.) It was because of this open secret that virtually every journalistic endorsement in the country went against him, including from publications (like The Dallas Morning News or The Arizona Republic) that are ordinarily rock-ribbed Republican, and others (like USA Today) that had not offered endorsements before or (like The Atlantic) generally did so only once per century. It was because of this that his party’s previous nominee, Mitt Romney, publicly denounced him—and that most of the political establishment, Democratic and Republican alike, assumed that no person like him could ever reach the White House.
(The shared certainty that Trump would fall short, which Wolff demonstrates extended to every part of the Trump campaign as well, may explain one of the major journalistic failures of the campaign: the disproportionate harping on Hillary Clinton’s email “problems,” as if this objectively third-tier failing were on a par with Trump’s grossly disqualifying traits. Most of the press assumed she would soon be in office; this was a warm-up for the kind of inspection real presidents should be prepared to undergo.)
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Who is also in on this open secret? Virtually everyone in a position to do something about it, which at the moment means members of the Republican majority in Congress.
They know what is wrong with Donald Trump. They know why it’s dangerous. They understand—or most of them do—the damage he can do to a system of governance that relies to a surprising degree on norms rather than rules, and whose vulnerability has been newly exposed. They know—or should—about the ways Trump’s vanity and avarice are harming American interests relative to competitors like Russia and China, and partners and allies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific.