An absolutely brilliant long form article by Richard David Hames. It’s so, so good.
Some curated quotes:
Donald Trump is not an interruption of the American story; he is one of its clearest chapters. He condenses habits that long predate him—mythmaking, extraction, spectacle, racial hierarchy, masculine anxiety—into a single, gaudy figure. To look at him carefully is to see the civilisation that made him.
The United States was founded on a dazzling contradiction: “all men are created equal,” written by men who owned other humans. Its history since has been a choreography of grand ideals and systematic betrayal. One response to this tension has been hypocrisy—keeping the language of virtue while quietly doing the opposite. Another response, Trump’s response, is to drop the mask.
