Joshua Rothman writes:

It was odd, for many reasons, to be a journalist in 2016 and 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump. Part of the oddness was that seemingly every story had to include him. If a reporter travelled somewhere to gather material on something apparently unrelated—a natural disaster, a sporting event, a scientific discovery—it felt important to explore whether the people who lived there had voted for Trump, and why. Writing about individuals, one found it crucial to note whether they liked Trump. His rise was connected to so many aspects of modern American life, from reality television and information technology to gender politics and deindustrialization, that weaving it in seemed not just natural but inevitable. We were in Trump’s America, and so to understand Trumpism was to understand the country, and vice versa. That’s an intellectual way of putting it. From another perspective, Trumpism was a mood that infected everything; it still is.

One of the central contentions of Trump’s movement was that the world was run by a corrupt, deviant, and rootless élite, a cabal of cosmopolitan globalists who held themselves out as enlightened but were actually callous, self-interested, and predatory. (Trump positioned himself as an alternative to this group: if the rich weren’t like you and me, he was the exception.) Another Trumpist tenet was that our society had become lawless, its justice system far too lenient. (He promised rough justice: “Lock her up!”) Yet another was that the technocratic experts were part of a deep state, and weren’t telling the truth. (He knew better.) And then there was a claim about power, which was to be enjoyed and employed nakedly, in place of the nuanced manipulations of norms and bureaucracies.

This wasn’t exactly an unprecedented mix of ideas, and yet, just a year or two earlier, it hadn’t been anywhere close to taking over America. How had it ascended so quickly? I started seeing Trumpism’s arrival through the metaphor of a kaleidoscope. In the ones my kids own, translucent plastic pieces tumble into new designs as the barrel rotates, creating patterns that, after periods of hesitation, click into place. Politics, I came to think, were a kind of dark kaleidoscope. Familiar fears and anxieties shifted until they assumed novel, captivating configurations. Trumpism was such a pattern. It was a grim vision of society that didn’t make sense logically but, for some, held together for reasons of emotion or identity. If there really was a class of unaccountable, libertine global élites plundering the world, then wasn’t Trump obviously a member? You weren’t bothered by such questions if you liked what you saw through the kaleidoscope. For you, Trump was the one spinning the barrel—an observer of the pattern, rather than a part of it.

A kaleidoscope is always shifting, with new patterns coming into focus. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been fascinating and horrifying onlookers for more than a decade; in addition to being an actual set of appalling events that involved real perpetrators and real victims, it’s been a political wild card and a conspiratorial lure. But it’s only recently—with the release of millions of documents, which anyone can read for themselves—that its pieces have really snapped into place. Trump, for many, is now inside its pattern, along with a lot of other people, organizations, and institutions. A different dark vision of society has emerged. Suddenly, we seem to be living in the age of Epstein. We tell ourselves that by understanding his rise to power we might understand the world. [Continue reading…]