Something Else To Keep In Mind

It's no secret that we're more than likely heading into some pretty bad times.

Here's a look at a moment from 80 years ago - from what we were taught was among the worst times ever - with a slightly corrected perspective.

It does not mean things weren't as bad as they seemed. Look at it for fuck's sake - those folks are not having a party. They're barely scraping by.

The point is that they did scrape by. They made it. They hung together, they worked their asses off, and they helped make it better.

Echoes

It pisses me off that I don't know this shit before I learn about this shit.

I went to public schools in what was then a very progressive district, and we never heard one fucking thing about this - or about Tulsa, or Rosewood, or Sanford, or any of the other incidents of outright white supremacist assholery that still goes on in this country even though it gets dressed up in different clothing once in a while and changes its name so we can pretend it's not happening the way POC tell us it's happening.

It pisses me off.

"Alternative Facts"

The Daddy State will change the meaning of words to suit their immediate needs.

They denounce Historical Fact as Political Correctness, while demanding that we accept their demagoguery as truth.

WaPo:

CHARLOTTESVILLE — A Monticello tour guide was explaining how enslaved people built, planted and tended a terrace of vegetables at Thomas Jefferson’s estate earlier this summer when a woman interrupted to share her annoyance.

“Why are you talking about that?” she demanded, according to Gary Sandling, vice president of Monticello’s visitor programs and services. “You should be talking about the plants."

At Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and other plantations across the South, an effort is underway to deal more honestly with the brutal institution that the Founding Fathers relied on to build their homes and their wealth: slavery.

Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia, some sites are also connecting that ugly past to modern-day racism and inequality.

Here's the thing - nobody owes you a customized version of history. If you need it to be scrubbed clean so it fits with your narrow viewpoint, go to Disneyland. The rest of us know enough to prefer learning about real things in real ways.
Weirdly, if you spend enough time online, you'll encounter oddball web skulkers barking about some of the weirdest shit you ever heard, swearing to its authenticity, and proclaiming it as the truth that everybody is just too blind to see - specifically citing its wacky oddball-ness as proof of its veracity.  As if the more incredible something is, the more believable it has to be.

Some History

Driftglass and Blue Gal remind us all the time that a liberal's super power is a functioning memory - which is aided greatly by healthy doses of skepticism and curiosity.

Homestead Act(s):

The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km2; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.

An extension of the homestead principle in law, the Homestead Acts were an expression of the Free Soil policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave-owners who wanted to buy up large tracts of land and use slave labor, thereby shutting out free white farmers.

The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, opened up millions of acres. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the Federal government of the United States could apply. Women and immigrants who had applied for citizenship were eligible. The 1866 Act explicitly included black Americans and encouraged them to participate, but rampant discrimination, systemic barriers and bureaucratic inertia slowed black gains. Historian Michael Lanza argues that while the 1866 law pack was not as beneficial as it might have been, it was part of the reason that by 1900 one fourth of all Southern black farmers owned their own farms.

Several additional laws were enacted in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 sought to address land ownership inequalities in the south during Reconstruction. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 granted land to a claimant who was required to plant trees—the tract could be added to an existing homestead claim and had no residency requirement.

The Kinkaid Amendment of 1904 granted a full section—640 acres (260 ha)–to new homesteaders settling in western Nebraska. An amendment to the Homestead Act of 1862, the Enlarged Homestead Act, was passed in 1909 and doubled the allotted acreage from 160 to 320 acres (65 to 129 ha). Another amended act, the national Stock-Raising Homestead Act, was passed in 1916 and again increased the land involved, this time to 640 acres (260 ha).

I grew up on the plains of Colorado, and I don't remember a time when I was unaware of the simple fact that with very few exceptions, my grandparents and my immigrant great-grandparents were dirt farmers whose families staked claims under Mr Lincoln's Homestead Act.

We had songs and everything:

So it makes me a little extra nutty when I hear the MAGA rubes spoutin' off about their rugged individualism and how those dirty socialists are just lookin' to turn us all into a buncha moochers and blah blah blah. I fucking hate that shit.

I'm not saying we had nothing to do with building our lives and doing good things for ourselves, but we have to get back to where we can acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

I didn't earn my birthright. I had nothing to do with being born into white middle class suburbia. I didn't earn my way into mostly brand new public schools. I didn't make any of the mortgage payments on my parents' houses.

And on and on and on.

We have to get the fuck over ourselves, and start understanding that cooperation and collaboration - and yes, the collective efforts of all of us - are not just important, but essential to our survival.

Today's Today

They really weren't asking for much. They just wanted a pig-headed and corrupt government to leave them alone so they could love each other and be a family like any other family.

Loving v Virginia (1967)

...a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage as violations of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[2] The case was brought by Mildred Loving (née Jeter), a woman of color, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored".

The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case. On June 12, 1967, the Court issued a unanimous decision in their favor and overturned their convictions. The Court struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, thereby overruling the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites.[3] The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do.[3] Additionally, the Court ruled that the freedom to marry was a constitutionally protected fundamental liberty, and therefore the government's deprivation of it on an arbitrary basis such as race was violation of the Due Process Clause.

The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S. and is remembered annually on Loving Day. It has been the subject of several songs and three movies, including the 2016 film Loving. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional, including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.[4]

Today's Today

Happy birthday to an American hero.

Jeannette Rankin, born this day in 1880.

Jeannette Pickering Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) was an American politician and women's rights advocate, and the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana in 1916, and again in 1940. She remains the only woman elected to Congress by Montana.

Each of Rankin's Congressional terms coincided with initiation of U.S. military intervention in each of the two world wars. A lifelong pacifist and a supporter of non-interventionism, she was one of 50 House members, along with six Senators, who opposed the war declaration of 1917, and the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

- and -

On December 8, Rankin was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan. Hisses could be heard in the gallery as she cast the vote; several colleagues, including Rep. (later Senator) Everett Dirksen, asked her to change it to make the resolution unanimous—or at very least, to abstain—but she refused. "As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."

After the vote, a crowd of reporters pursued Rankin. She took refuge in a phone booth until Capitol Police arrived to escort her to her office. There, she was inundated with angry telegrams and phone calls, including one from her brother, who said, "Montana is 100 percent against you." Rankin refused to apologize. "Everyone knew that I was opposed to the war, and they elected me," she said. "I voted as the mothers would have had me vote." A wire service photo of Rankin sequestered in the phone booth, calling for assistance, appeared the following day in newspapers across the country.

While her action was widely ridiculed in the press, William Allen White, writing in the Kansas Emporia Gazette, acknowledged her courage in taking it:

Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. The Gazette entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord, it was a brave thing! And its bravery someway discounted its folly. When, in a hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based upon moral indignation is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze, not for what she did, but for the way she did it.

Two days later, a similar war declaration against Germany and Italy came to a vote; Rankin abstained. Her political career effectively over; she did not run for reelection in 1942. Asked years later if she had ever regretted her action, Rankin replied, "Never. If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute."

- and -

A member of the Republican Party during the Progressive Era, Rankin was also instrumental in initiating the legislation that eventually became the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting unrestricted voting rights to women. In her victory speech, she recognized the power she held as the only woman able to vote in Congress, saying "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me". She championed the causes of women's rights and civil rights throughout a career that spanned more than six decades.

Today's Today

105 years ago - April 14, 1914. Ludlow CO

National Guard troopers - reportedly being paid by John D Rockefeller - opened fire on a camp filled with striking coal miners and their families.

Results: 

• A large part of the Ludlow tent colony site was destroyed by fire
• UMWA organizer Louis Tikas was assaulted and then, along with two other men, executed by gunshot - Tikas was shot in the back
• five other men were killed by gunshot
• 2 women and 11 children were killed by suffocation and/or fires set by militiamen 

News of the events caused worldwide protest and condemnation.

Today's Quote(s)

"Notre Dame is one of the world's great treasures, and we're thinking of the people of France during your time of grief. It's in our nature to mourn when we see history lost - but it's also in our nature to rebuild for tomorrow, as strong as we can."












"It was burning at a level you rarely see a fire burn. They say it was caused by renovation. 
Renovation - what's that all about? So that puts a damper on what we were about to say, to be honest. 
With that being said, I wanna tell you that a lot has been accomplished in our country in the last year and a half."

The Four Goals

Anthropocene - the age of humans - a time when people will determine the future and the survivability of their own kind without directly considering the vagaries of nature.

A time when humans will decide whether or not the world remains a place where humans can live.

We're fucked unless we figure some things out.

• end our use of fossil fuels
• shift to a system of food production that reduces our reliance on meat proteins and puts less pressure on fresh water resources
• manage the oceans
• Preserve current wild lands, and allow some of the developed lands to return to a wild state

The short version is all about reversing the typical bullshit that says we have to accept The Tragedy Of The Commons as gospel and inevitable.

Today's Tweet

Rich people can be talked into charitable giving as long as they can show it off - going to The Gala, or Casino Night to benefit the local hospital - and then brag about it later.

If you want the real thing, ask the poor.

This day 172 years ago – 23 March 1847 – the Choctaw, a Native American tribe, donated $170 to the Memphis Irish Relief Committee.

Their generosity is commemorated in a sculpture titled Kindred Spirits in Cork.

A scholarship for Choctaw students in Ireland was announced in 2018 pic.twitter.com/jkFRf4JiQX

— This Day in Irish History (@ThisDayIrish) March 23, 2019

Today's Today

International Women's Day

Here's a little something about Dr Mary Walker - the only woman ever to receive The Medal Of Honor.

Change Gonna Come

Part of "The Vulnerability Series," a collection of paintings by Syrian artist Abdalla Al Omari.

World leaders - somewhere not too far down the very road we're on.

They all had more than a few chances to "make it right". Some tried harder than others, but the likely results will render those differences moot.

Obama

Ahmadinejad

Merkel

Cameron

Erdogan

Kim

al-Assad

45*

Putin

I'm anything but some kind of God-Knobbin' Jesus Pimp, but this tune has one of my all-time favorite lines: "On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door won't keep out the lord's burnin' rain."

Sin City -- The Flying Burrito Brothers

A Little History

How Wall Street got its name.

First, the local tribes just walked around it.

Then, when the British were about to land their forces from the water side, the Dutch had sense enough to know they were cooked, so they gave up.

"Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity." -- George S Patton

A wall - didn't work for New Amsterdam, or Hadrian, or the GDR, or the Chinese, or or or.

Charlie Tells The Truth

Charlie Pierce is a national treasure.

"Battlefield courage and political courage can be quite different things"

His piece on Poppy Bush at Esquire:

However, as Bush rose in the Republican Party, its power base swung south and west. It slowly embraced empowered radical religious fundamentalism. And, most significantly, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, it made a conscious decision to energize itself through the splintered, but still powerful, remnants of American apartheid. 

Bush never appeared comfortable with these developments, but he never could quite bring himself to denounce them, and he had very little compunction about using them when he needed to do so. Because of this, and because of the starchy aloofness of his basic mien, he struggled mightily against the impression that he was inauthentic. He did not often win that battle.

My lord, the man enlisted to fight in World War II when he was still underage and he came back a genuine hero. (Say what you will about those old WASP families, but there are a lot of their names on the wall in Memorial Hall and in the Memorial Church at Harvard.) Why did he feel that, to be president, he had to butch it up against Dan Rather, or tell an audience after his debate against Geraldine Ferraro that he’d “kicked a little ass last night.” Why did he feel he had to flip flop on reproductive choice as baroquely as he did? He felt he had to act in this ridiculous fashion, and he wasn’t strong enough to fight against his own ambition. Battlefield courage and political courage can be quite different things.

- and -

He could have been one of the most powerful voices against the slide of Republicanism into movement conservatism, religious fanaticism, and irrationality in general. Maybe nobody could have stopped it. (Even his son, George W. Bush, made a kabuki stab at it. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? But, because he was a Bush, W handed this phantom philosophy over to Karl Rove, who had been too much of a ruthless ratfcker for the elder Bush. We ended up as a nation that tortures.) But he could have tried. His stature would have counted against it.

But he could never muster enough political gumption to overcome his own ambition.

Poppy Bush

Bush41 died late last night.

Poppy gets points for the good things he did, not the least of which were passing the ADA and making some moves to get the federal budget in line - the tax increases he let through would cost him dearly in 1992.

And we should remember his efforts to fix some of the shit he helped create. Noriega's Panama comes to mind. And Saddam - to an extent, even though he got an awful lot of Iraqis (and Persians) butchered simply by letting that shit go on in the 80s.

And there are other little gems as well.

By that same token, we can lay a good bit of the blame for lots of things at his feet. eg: The other Narco States of Central America that were strengthened because he refused to pursue the idiots who gave us Iran-Contra. And a lot of the shit the CIA pulled under his directorship that helped create conditions that eventually led to the blowback that came home to us on 9/11.

So I won't eulogize him, partly because I didn't know him, but mostly because in this country, we're supposed to be able to recognize that while some presidents are obviously better presidents than other presidents - and far better people too - they're all humans, they're way short of perfection, and not one of them deserves to be fitted for a halo.

Be Amazed

Maybe 52,000 years ago.

Sarah Kaplan, WaPo:

Radio isotope dating of a calcite crust that covers part of the image revealed that it is more than 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 52,000 years. Even the more recent date would make the image older than any painted representation of an animal that has been found.
- and -

“Maybe it’s universal,” said Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia. “Art ... is something that we as humans just do."

Speechify Me, Baby

If 45* is remembered for anything other than his near-absolute venality, it won't be for his eloquence.

Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune, imagineering "Trump's Gettysburg Address:

Please tell your kids to be ready to recite this by Monday:

Forty tweets and seven “Fox and Friends” episodes ago, Sean Hannity brought up a really great point about my Electoral College win. It was so huge. Really, nobody has ever seen such a massive win, and they said it couldn’t be done. Couldn’t be done. But I did it.

And Hannity — how much do we love Sean Hannity, really? He does such a fantastic job, nobody better. And Hannity said my huge Electoral College win, which they say was the biggest ever, was dedicated to all of you, the forgotten men and women of America. Don’t we love America? Don’t we love our flag? And Merry Christmas. People are saying Merry Christmas again. Nobody was saying it before. Nobody said it!

So we are dedicated to the proposition that all men — and women, don’t forget the women. The women love me so much. I won big with the women. The women love Trump.

The proposition that all — I’m just going to say “all,” otherwise the Fake News will call me sexist or make up some other lies. That’s all they do. You see them back there. Just the worst, most disgusting people you’ll ever meet. Not all of them, but really all of them. Terrible. Enemies of the people.

The proposition that all are created equal, and they are. There are good people on all sides. I got in trouble for saying that once, but it’s true. Good people, you know who I’m talking about. The tough guys. You don’t mess with. They love their country. These guys. Tough. Tough, I’m telling you.

Now we are engaged in a great war with Fake News. Yes, yes, you know. Fake news. They lie. They lie all the time, it’s all they do.

I stand up here giving a speech for an hour and a half, many times without notes, and then they say, “He’s lost it,” and yet we have 25,000 people showing up to speeches. “Donald Trump,” they go, “Donald Trump has lost it.” I beat 17 great Republicans. I beat senators, I beat governors, a couple of people, great people like Ben Carson, Ben Carson was tough, but I beat 17 great people and I respectfully say I beat the Bush dynasty, OK? Pretty recently. OK?

Now I have the privilege of going against Crooked Hillary Clinton. So I beat Crooked Hillary. I beat Crooked Hillary and the Electoral College is hard it’s, frankly, if we didn’t know better, and maybe we’re starting to find things out that we didn’t know, it’s hard, and harder to win than popular vote.

Anyway, in a larger sense, we can’t dedicate — we can’t cons … we can’t con-sten-creet? Constencreet. A lot of people don’t know that word. I know big words, so many. I’m very smart. Some say a genius.

We can’t constencreet this ground. The brave men, so many, who struggled here, have constencreeted it, and they did. So constencreet. Really. The most. So proud.

The world will little note, they never note things anymore. You notice that? No noting. It’s like, bing bong bing.

They won’t note that I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record.

And we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining, and it is a great task.

This nation, this big, beautiful nation. This nation, under God, and it is, we’ve got God back. Just ask Mike Pence. He loves God. Prays all the time. We brought back prayer. So good. So, so good. The prayer.

This nation shall have a new birth of freedom. You think we would birth freedom if Crooked Hillary won? No. Nope. There would be no freedom births. The opposite. Whatever the opposite, it would be that. Just all over the place. Terrible.

So our government. MY government, I’m doing such a good job, you know it. People say it’s the best job any president has ever done. Truly amazing.

My government, for you people, and you’re the good ones, you know that. You’re the real Americans, not those others. My government shall not perish from the earth, or from space. Space Force! We’re going to rule the space. No one will stop us.

God bless you and God bless our great America. Hats are available in the front. Make sure you buy several.

On Kanye

It's always about a lot more than is obvious at first blush - and I'm not minimizing - I don't think it's unreasonable to include "Privilege Envy" in the description.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic:

Kanye West, a god in this time, awakened, recently, from a long public slumber to embrace Donald Trump. He hailed Trump, as a “brother,” a fellow bearer of “dragon energy,” and impugned those who objected as suppressors of “unpopular questions,” “thought police” whose tactics were “based on fear.” It was Trump, West argued, not Obama, who gave him hope that a black boy from the South Side of Chicago could be president. “Remember like when I said I was gonna run for president?,” said Kanye in interview with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God. “I had people close to me, friends of mine, making jokes, making memes, talking shit, now it’s like oh, that was proven that that could have happened.”

There is an undeniable logic here. Like Trump, West is a persistent bearer of slights large and small—but mostly small. (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Nike all came in for a harangue.) Like Trump, West is a narcissist, “the greatest artist of all time,” he claimed, helming what would soon be “the biggest apparel company in human history.” And, like Trump, West is shockingly ignorant. Chicago was “the murder capital of the world,” West asserted, when in fact Chicago is not even the murder capital of America. West’s ignorance is not merely deep but also dangerous. For if Chicago truly is “the murder capital of the world,” then perhaps it is in need of the federal occupation threatened by Trump.

It is so hard to honestly discuss the menace without forgetting. It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country which specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.

- and -

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that “we.” In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.


For my own bad self, I'll try to remember that whatever else Kanye thinks himself to be, he is first a foremost a Kardashian.

One More Podcast

Teddy Roosevelt was my kinda Republican.

He was too cute by half with the whole Gunboat Diplomacy thing, but three things:

1. His forceful attitude on pushing back against corporations - the necessity of regulation in order to keep too much power and too much money from consolidating in too few hands.

2. Trying to balance the interests internal to the US against US National Interests outside our borders.

3. He was a man of his times. That doesn't mean some of the shitty things he did - or were done on his watch - are excusable, or that anybody should approve of them now.

We muddle thru and we stumble forward.

The End Of The Beginning?

Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter:

Given the nation’s problems, from the unsettling situation along the Korean Peninsula, to the destruction left by Hurricane Harvey, to general income inequality, to terrorism, to climate change, our timing in bringing a man like Donald Trump into the White House really couldn’t be worse. The man is clearly unfit for any kind of public office, let alone the highest office in the land. The majority of the electorate knew this when they went to the voting booths. His “many sides” response to the events in Charlottesville during his horribly eventful, 17-day vacation sparked a run on his remaining popularity. (As Trump’s better, Winston Churchill said, “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”) The members of the president’s vaunted business panels left him. The members of his arts panel left him. The Republican leadership blanches at the mention of his name. His popularity in the swing states he won is on a downward spiral. Even charities that had booked space for their fund-raisers at Mar-a-Lago, his mid-market wedding-and-birthday rental facility, are pulling out. He still has the neo-Nazis and the racists, which must give him some comfort. This is going to sound unkind, but why are supremacists invariably the worst specimens of the race they are claiming to defend?

With normal presidencies, history often takes its time reaching a verdict. But once in a while, the verdict arrives with the speed of a tweet after an imagined slight. Judging from the assessments of six distinguished historians—see “History’s First Draft,” such is Trump’s grim fate. His time in office, like so much of his life, will be deemed a corrupt, messy shambles. The only lingering question is the extent of the damage he will have done by the time he is forced out of office.

Reading the essays by Jon Meacham, Stacy Schiff, Robert Dallek, Edmund Morris, A. Scott Berg, and Garry Wills, you come to the realization that our 45th president resembles none of the others—there is no true parallel. He is a mutant. In terms of temperament and judgment, he is the opposite of a Monroe or an F.D.R. He may be as intellectually hollow as Reagan, but he lacks Reagan’s humor, grace, and core of principle. He may be as psychologically disfigured as Nixon, but he lacks Nixon’s intelligence and stamina.