The moral obligation to protest the Republican Convention.
“You’ve been tough on me,” he said, “but I love you.”
It was last summer, and there I was, in the lobby of the NBC building in New York, confronted with the flaming orange visage that is Donald Trump. He was being gracious. I had just finished criticizing him on a daytime talk show, and our paths had crossed in front of the elevator bank. He commandeered my phone to ask my wife if I was treating her well. Before we parted, he added, “If I had your brains, I’d be president.”
There’s no question that Donald Trump has “uuuuge” charisma, a brutally appealing magnetism that amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time. Each election, we hear that this run for the presidency says more about who we are than any other—Obama defines us, Reagan embodies us, Shrub will be the ruin of us all. We’ve become inured to the get-out-the-vote sales pitch; the nation endures. And yet this election is indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and perhaps the most important.