America squarely has itself to blame for what "we all must suffer through," never-Trump conservative attorney George Conway, one of the president-elect's strongest critics from the right, wrote for The Atlantic.
At least in 2016, wrote Conway, "those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself, and we at least had the conceit of believing that the presidency was not just a man, but an institution greater than the man, with legal and traditional mechanisms to make sure he’d never go off the rails."
But, he added, "the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence" over those four years means we have every reason to know what will happen again.
"So there was no excuse this year," he wrote." We knew all we needed to know, even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets, the fantasizing about shooting journalists and arresting political opponents as 'enemies of the people,' even apart from the evidence presented in courts and the convictions in one that demonstrated his abject criminality."
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The fact is, Conway continued, Trump is "a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse."
But America understood all of this — and had extensive knowledge of everything from the authoritarian blueprint of Project 2025, to his plans for economy-busting, price-exploding tariffs, to his pledges to put conspiracy theorists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health. And all of that was fine with a majority of the voting public.
"I dare not predict the future again, particularly as it comes to elections and other forms of mass behavior," wrote Conway. "But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves."
