For its October 2024 issue, The Atlantic looks to the presidential election with a package of stories––and a striking cover illustration––examining Donald Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies. Articles cover the Republican politicians who bent easily to Trump’s will, and the threats that a second Trump term poses, with reporting by Tim Alberta, Anne Applebaum, Mark Leibovich, Helen Lewis, Elaina Plott Calabro, Hanna Rosin, and Sarah Zhang. Stories are publishing this week and next; please reach out with any questions or requests to interview The Atlantic’s writers on their reporting.
On the cover: The illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visual language of old Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to portray a circus wagon on its ominous approach to a defiled Capitol. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a particular inspiration. We believe this to be the first cover bearing no headline or typography in The Atlantic’s 167-year history.
Leading the package, and online today, is Mark Leibovich’s “Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump.” Back in 2015, when Trump first sought the Republican Party’s nomination, he boasted to Leibovich that he would easily bend Republicans to his will. “They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. But politicians were weak, Trump said, unlike the “brutal, vicious killers” he dealt with in the business world—they were pathetic “puppets” who, Trump said, would submit to him. “It will be very easy,” Trump said.
To Leibovich and just about anyone who’d spent time around politics, this sounded like empty bombast. But Trump turned out to be right. He “rolled over” his Republican competitors, gleefully humiliating them along the way. When he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, party elders such as Mitch McConnell assured people that Republican institutions were strong enough to withstand Trump. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party,” McConnell said. In retrospect, this was hilarious.
Republican leaders know full well who Trump is; after all, most of them condemned him fulsomely. Yet today, even after he lost the presidency in 2020, Trump dominates the GOP and has remade it in his image. His family controls the party apparatus. Despite knowing better, Republican politicians––including many who once said that Trump would destroy the party––march in lockstep obeisance to him, kissing his ring and even imitating his sartorial style. “If Trump had a mustache,” Leibovich writes, “his acolytes would all grow and groom one just like his—as Baath party loyalists did for Saddam Hussein.”
The party’s prostration before Trump is total; the gap between what the GOP historically espoused and what it now allows itself to abide is huge. A once-serious party has been subdued, disoriented, and denuded of whatever its convictions once were. And all of this, Leibovich wonders, to what end
Already published: Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile of Kash Patel, “The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump,” looks into Patel’s exceptional devotion to Trump during his presidency, and how Patel is the type of person Trump is likely to turn to in a second term.
The issue continues The Atlantic’s crucial reporting on the 2024 election, which includes the “If Trump Wins” cover package for the January/February 2024 issue. “If Trump Wins” featured essays by two dozen Atlantic writers on the consequences of a possible second Trump presidency, and was recently translated into Spanish.
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