Wow. My breath has just been taken away by this Adam Gopnik piece in The New Yorker's Daily Comment section.
It is a concise and shattering summary of the dangers that lie ahead should Donald Trump be elected.
Gopnick is a well known wordsmith who more often than not confines himself to the arts or to social commentary. He lived in Paris for a long time and wrote many famous essays about that town.
Today he has dipped his acid pen in the 2016 race and describes for us just what we are facing.
Go read his piece. It is short and worth memorizing.
Here are a few of the choice bits regarding Trump:
He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day.
First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy.
One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’
No, you can’t.
Gopnik makes it clear that our republic is in grave danger. I agree with him and should he decide to leave America and head back to France to his table at the Brasserie Balzar, I just might be following behind.
(Edited to correct the misspelling of this brilliant writer’s name. There is no “C” in Gopnik)