ILYA SHAPIRO: Two Decades in the Swamp.
On Election Night, you could barely think over the sound of people rushing to update their résumés. Uber drivers found themselves doing more therapy than driving. George Washington University administrators scrambled to set up “support rooms” with puppies and crayons. Democrats resumed questioning the legitimacy of presidential elections.
Trump entered office promising to “drain the swamp,” which, in practice, meant hiring half of it, firing a quarter, and leaving the rest to leak confidential information to cable news. He governed like someone live-tweeting a traffic accident he was also causing. Every 3 am post was an experiment to see how much chaos the bond market could absorb before breakfast.
Then came the Russia investigation—America’s performance-art piece about alleged collusion with ex-Commies. Half the city believed that the Kremlin had written Trump’s speeches; the other half believed that the deep state had orchestrated the whole thing to relive Watergate and get book deals. The only clear winners were white-shoe law firms that now had “Special Counsel” on speed dial.
The opposition rebranded itself as the “Resistance,” though having the media, universities, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the federal bureaucracy on its side didn’t make much of a case for heroism. Women’s marches filled the city with pink hats, while cable news operated on the premise that every Trump tweet was a constitutional crisis—even as the Mueller Report landed like overcooked lasagna at Cafe Milano.
The Right discovered it liked having a brawler in the White House. Years of media bias, bureaucratic overreach, and cultural condescension had primed GOP voters for someone who would punch back. Trump supporters flocked to the Trump International Hotel, which served as a kind of embassy for Red America.
In 2018, Trump seated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, after confirmation hearings that began like a poorly conceived political drama and ended with protesters in Handmaid’s Tale costumes. He would appoint two more justices who’d also read The Federalist Papers. Combined with tax reform, deregulation, and a deep bench of originalist judges, the Court picks were his most durable achievements. My book on the politics of judicial nominations, Supreme Disorder, came out four days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The timing was morbidly auspicious, but my publisher claims he has an alibi.
At home, our first child arrived just in time for that crazy 2016 election. Our second commemorated the 2018 midterms. Nothing sharpens your view of public policy like strapping toddlers into car seats as you listen to a podcast about the Administrative Procedure Act. And the boys’ earliest memories of civic life involve adults shouting about collusion, impeachment—something about a phone call to the Ukrainian president and a possible Netflix pitch—and whether the president had been too harsh to a CNN correspondent.
Then came 2020.
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