How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.” …
[W]e talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”
June 17th, 2025 at 12:21PM
Losing skippers blame the wind.
Donald Trump might have had no business being nominated again, and yet he is again the president. So far no Theodore H. White has come forth to make sense of those Obama-Trump-Biden voters sitting 2024 out; Salena Zito might have something in progress but her biases are more evident.
A scolding from a neurotic professor on her way out of the country is unlikely to coax many of those voters back into the fold. Likewise, sprinkling a few Old Glories in among the usual array of third world and freak flags in gatherings of people more than a few of whom were, a year ago, probably reassuring all and sundry that Old Joe was still fine going to change many minds.
While all those gatherings were going on, the carping about the Army Day birthday parade went from “We don’t do North Korea” to “That marching was pathetic.” Even some Russian fanboys got in on the fun on You Tube.
Donald Trump is fortunate in his antagonists.
June 17th, 2025 at 4:31PM
He is indeed fortunate that some of his noisiest antagonists are idiots. He is fortunate that Joe Biden’s blind narcissism was enabled by an entire political class. Etc. But Marci Shore doesn’t seem to me any more neurotic than your typical brilliant intellectual; she seems morally sensible and rational. She may well be right that things in this country will deteriorate under Trumpism in a very dangerous way. He seems at the moment, for instance, to be taking us to war.
June 18th, 2025 at 11:23AM
You’re right about the war warnings. Wars, whether international or internal, are easier to start than to end, and the endings never turn out the way the war colleges game them out.
As far as Marci Shore, I have trouble squaring “morally sensible and rational” with “throwing up in a plastic bag” and going through with the “If [X] wins I’m moving to Canada” threat that I’ve been hearing from people for years. That puts her more in the “noisy antagonist” class than “typical brilliant intellectual”. Your mileage may vary.