Dear Friend,

Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son, Don Jr., had the worst judgment of anyone in the world.” So why do so many Republicans see Donald Trump Jr. as his father’s political heir?

David Roth explained it in an essay in the November issue of The New Republic: “If Trump Jr. is Trumpism’s future, it is because of how thoroughly he is both a creature of its restless, desperate, miserable present and guided by his father’s oppressive legacy”—perhaps “his foremost impersonator.”

The New Republic has for four years outlined how our country is failing under Trump. But as David Roth writes, “Trumpism—which is not a politics or an ideology so much as it is the belief that nothing matters beyond how it relates to Donald Trump himself—remains unscathed.”

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As Roth explains: “If [Trump’s] presidency has an ideology beyond the expression of his various lifelong bigotries and the pursuit of his personal feuds, it is the maintenance of this status quo. Trumpism is primarily about perpetuating and justifying the centrality of one man.” Roth added that, “the ideology that has assumed Trump’s image and energy—and, in the process, effectively replaced the coded version of it that was once understood as conservative politics—is grounded in a very specific and very deep sense of entitlement.”

In the final analysis, Roth believes “Trump didn’t invent this worldview, but he did inhabit it better—and, hilariously, more honestly—than any other conservative politician. He succeeded in co-opting the Republican Party simply by hammering away at the text instead of dutifully nuancing the subtext.”

As we mercifully reach the end of the 2020 election cycle, Roth reminds us that “this is all they’ve got, and they are going to keep raising their glasses to the brutal moment they’ve made until it is pushed into the past. They do not want to go home. Until they are kicked out, they won’t.”

If you follow politics, reading David Roth, and the best investigative reporters, opinion writers, and cultural critics in America will bring new insight during these troubled times.

Subscribe to The New Republic today.

Sincerely,

Kerrie Gillis, publisher

Read David Roth’s How Don Jr. Became the Future of Trumpism