Is Trump Still a Threat?

Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that somehow Trump’s gang of fools had been able to overturn the election results on January 6th and he was sworn in again and was now midway through his second term.

I’m conducting this fanciful exercise because last night we ate dinner at the home of friends — both of whom have advanced degrees, both of whom follow the news closely, both of whom have professional careers and both of whom are still absolutely convinced that Trump represents a real threat to democracy and will continue to push an anti-democratic agenda through 2024.

You can get some insights into how things would now be going along in D.C. if Trump had managed to overturn the 2020 election by reading a new book, The Divider, Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, by two journalists, Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser, who are about as plugged into the ins and outs of politics as two Fake News reporters can be. He’s the chief White House correspondent for The Failing New York Times, she’s a staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine, okay?

The book is over 600 pages and is based on a combination of second-hand sources, three hundred interviews (fully annotated, I gave up counting the footnotes) and two lengthy interviews with Trump, one interview three months after January 6th, the second interview in November 2021.