Atlantic October subject: Trump’s antidemocratic actions

For its October 2024 subject, The Atlantic appears to the presidential election with a bundle of tales––and a placing cowl illustration––inspecting Donald Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies. Articles cowl the Republican politicians who bent simply to Trump’s will, and the threats {that a} second Trump time period poses, with reporting by Tim Alberta, Anne Applebaum, Mark Leibovich, Helen Lewis, Elaina Plott Calabro, Hanna Rosin, and Sarah Zhang. Tales are publishing this week and subsequent; please attain out with any questions or requests to interview The Atlantic’s writers on their reporting.

On the duvet: The illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visible language of previous Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to painting a circus wagon on its ominous strategy to a defiled Capitol. One thing Depraved This Manner Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a selected inspiration. We imagine this to be the primary cowl bearing no headline or typography in The Atlantic’s 167-year historical past.

Main the bundle, and on-line at present, is Mark Leibovich’s “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.” Again in 2015, when Trump first sought the Republican Get together’s nomination, he boasted to Leibovich that he would simply bend Republicans to his will. “They may communicate badly about me now, however they gained’t later,” Trump stated. However politicians had been weak, Trump stated, not like the “brutal, vicious killers” he handled within the enterprise world—they had been pathetic “puppets” who, Trump stated, would undergo him. “It is going to be very simple,” Trump stated.

To Leibovich and nearly anybody who’d frolicked round politics, this appeared like empty bombast. However Trump turned out to be proper. He “rolled over” his Republican rivals, gleefully humiliating them alongside the way in which. When he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, get together elders reminiscent of Mitch McConnell assured people who Republican establishments had been robust sufficient to face up to Trump. “He’s not going to vary the essential philosophy of the get together,” McConnell stated. Looking back, this was hilarious.

Republican leaders know full properly who Trump is; in spite of everything, most of them condemned him fulsomely. But at present, even after he misplaced the presidency in 2020, Trump dominates the GOP and has remade it in his picture. His household controls the get together equipment. Regardless of understanding higher, Republican politicians––together with many who as soon as stated that Trump would destroy the get together––march in lockstep obeisance to him, kissing his ring and even imitating his sartorial model. “If Trump had a mustache,” Leibovich writes, “his acolytes would all develop and groom one similar to his—as Baath get together loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.”

The get together’s prostration earlier than Trump is whole; the hole between what the GOP traditionally espoused and what it now permits itself to abide is big. A once-serious get together has been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of no matter its convictions as soon as had been. And all of this, Leibovich wonders, to what finish

Already printed: Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Kash Patel, “The Man Who Will Do Something for Trump,” appears into Patel’s distinctive devotion to Trump throughout his presidency, and the way Patel is the kind of individual Trump is prone to flip to in a second time period.

The difficulty continues The Atlantic’s essential reporting on the 2024 election, which incorporates the “If Trump Wins” cowl bundle for the January/February 2024 subject. “If Trump Wins” featured essays by two dozen Atlantic writers on the results of a potential second Trump presidency, and was lately translated into Spanish.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com