The Radical Silence of Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day

Donald Trump’s presidency concluded not with mutiny in state capitals or an attempted attack on his successor, but with a calm, conventional ceremony in an otherwise quiet city.Walking through Washington, D.C., today, the silence in the streets was the sound of a country not quite ready to exhale. It was a fitting end to the noisiest era of American...

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What It Was Like to Watch Trump Leave

At dawn this morning, workers loaded couches and tables into a moving truck parked outside the West Wing. Men wearing white coveralls and carrying roller brushes and paint cans walked across the north driveway. Inside the White House, pictures of the 45th president had been removed from the walls. Only the hooks remained, ready for a new set of portraits...

7h

A Taxonomy of Donald Trump’s Facial Expressions

Of the many head-benders of the Trump era, the dialectic between absurdity and extreme gravity has been one of the hardest to manage. We have been obliged to take an unserious person very seriously indeed. It has hurt our brains. It has reminded us, again and again, that the 45th president of the United States is simultaneously a reality-television...

13h

Among the Guardsmen

Photographs by Tavon TaylorBeyond the dozen National Guardsmen stationed behind the Library of Congress, the seven-foot-tall fence lining the back side of the Capitol, and the men in balaclavas carrying assault rifles, 67-year-old Rick Genderson sells liquor and old wine in his store, Schneider’s of Capitol Hill. With its narrow aisles stocked with...

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Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?

I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In...

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America Can’t Exhale Just Yet

This weekend, every mayor of an American state capital was trying to answer the same question: How do I keep my city safe? Steven Reed in Montgomery, Alabama, and Frank Scott, in Little Rock, Arkansas, increased police patrols. In Richmond, Mayor Levar Stoney declared a state of emergency. Governors in Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin placed the National...

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The Capitol Rioters Are Giving Insurrection a Bad Name

In 1958 the American National Election Study began asking Americans whether they trusted the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time. By this measure, American trust in government peaked at 77 percent in 1964, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the election of Lyndon B. Johnson. By the end of Jimmy Carter’s...

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The Secret Service Is Bracing for Dangerous Times

For the first time in modern American history, the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power is in doubt. Extremists swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and at least some of them intended to hunt down and kill elected officials. During their riot, they left bloodstains on the inauguration grandstands.Now, in the final hours of the Trump presidency,...

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A Deep Clean Won’t Keep the White House Safe From COVID-19

Updated on January 19, 2021 at 9:10 a.m. ET Before the Bidens move into the White House on Wednesday, butlers and housekeepers will perform their usual rituals: They’ll dust the gilded portraits of George and Martha Washington flanking the East Room fireplace; they’ll discard the bedsheets and towels used by the outgoing first family; and they’ll...

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Republicans Will Try to Pretend Like Trump Never Happened

As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity...

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