We begin the last roundup of 2019 with an overview of the last year from Susan Glasser at The New Yorker:
Even now, three years into the Trump Presidency, there is no language to fully capture the madness of all this, though many of my journalistic colleagues have gone to great lengths to record and codify just how disturbingly nutty 2019 has been. The Washington Post reports that Trump ended the year having made more than fifteen thousand four hundred false and misleading statements since his inauguration. CNN’s “Inside Politics” produced a four-page, single-spaced list of all the people and institutions Trump has attacked by name this year. There are online trackers for the unprecedented levels of turnover in Trump’s Administration and for the rapidly proliferating array of lawsuits involving Trump’s assertions of sweeping executive authority. By any measure, 2019 will go down as a remarkable year in the annals of the American Presidency: Trump began it by causing the longest-ever federal government shutdown in history, after Congress refused to spend billions on his proposed border wall, and ended it as only the third President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.
Ed Kilgore looks at 2020 with a sense of apprehension:
[F]or political writers, of course, 2020 looms as a most consequential year primarily because it will determine whether the dire Trumpian experiment in populist white nationalism begun so abruptly in 2016 continues or at least temporarily ends.
Molly Jong-Fast at The Daily Beast (subscriber article):
How does one parse a decade that has been so incredibly bad for humanity as a whole but also produced some of the worst books, movies, dance moves, and cultural phenomena of all time? Yep—the decade that brought us all three Fifty Shades of Grey books (and movies) also featured countless more serious humanitarian atrocities.
Joe Scarborough at The Washington Post urges the media to properly label the outrageous moment we’re in:
Polite society warns against the drawing of certain historical parallels. But as another tumultuous year of Donald Trump’s presidency draws to a close, it seems like a good time to ask: Where does one look for a political equivalent in a year when the president’s supporters chanted “send her back” about a nonwhite member of Congress?
Should we attach a bland label like “illiberalism” to such a wretched public display when “fascism” fits so much better? And what term best describes a 2019 political rally where a U.S. president, who had previously suggested the shooting of migrants, laughed as a supporter shouted that they should be gunned down at the border?
Speaking of the border, Rachel Nolan looks at the translation crisis that’s creating even more chaos and injustice there:
The U.S. government claims to provide proper translation at all points in the immigration process, but, in practice, it rarely offers Mayan-language translation at the border or in holding cells.
Meanwhile, Catherine Rampell has new year’s resolutions for the media:
1. Make sure we’re in the information business, not the disinformation business.
Our president is an expert at getting the media to amplify his wildest, most unsubstantiated and often most self-serving claims — about the Bidens, a fictitious Ukraine server, carcinogenic windmills, etc. He knows that he can go months without a formal White House press briefing and instead just say a bunch of outrageous things at a rally that the media will repeat on loop.
Russel Berman looks at the life of legacy of Rep. John Lewis, who was recently diagnosed with cancer:
Lewis’s civil-rights background has conferred on him a moral authority unique among the 535 members of the House and the Senate. He speaks frequently of the “good trouble” he caused in the 1960s and in political fights since. And in the thundering speeches he occasionally delivers on the House floor, Lewis invokes the language of moral courage. Most recently, that was during the impeachment of President Donald Trump. “For some, this vote may be hard, but we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history,” Lewis said in explaining his support for the articles of impeachment.
On a final note, David Remnick also dedicates his piece to Rep. Lewis:
As Obama left his swearing in, Lewis approached him with a sheet of paper and asked the new President, the first black President, to sign it. And he did. He wrote, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.”