Donald Trump’s Dispatches From the Bunker

Plus, Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind.

Jim Swift

Dec 28

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Best of The Bulwark in 2022:

CHARLIE SYKES: The GOP’s George Santos Dilemma
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Editor’s note: We’re going to be a little slower paced than usual going into New Year’s… As you know, there won’t be a TNB this week, but we’ll still be publishing as news breaks! Take it easy out there in the last days of 2022.

BILL LUEDERS: Donald Trump’s Dispatches From the Bunker.

How’s the Big Guy been taking it? Not well.
Even before the House January 6th Committee held its final hearing; before it called for the filing of criminal charges against him; before it produced its voluminous report detailing the findings from its massive 18-month investigation into his efforts to subvert the result of the 2020 election; before the acquisition of his tax returns revealed that he had somehow managed to avoid a mandatory audit while lying for years about being under continual audit, Donald Trump was crying a river about the unfairness of it all.

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Steve Bannon is a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, but he’s trying to light a bonfire under American democracy. An intelligent, well-read man in the same category as Tucker Carlson, Bannon’s genius is in polarizing people. The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior joined Charlie Sykes in this encore episode from June.

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ANDRÉ FORGET: Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was common to hear people on social media ask, in horror, whether people were shortly going to start writing pandemic novels. The disease and the lockdowns seemed bad enough; would the publishers’ lists soon be flooded with books about middle-aged writers disinfecting their peaches? From a literary point of view, the problem with pandemics is that they offer little in the way of action. There is pain, there is suffering, there is fear—but there is not a lot of drama. When I heard people expressing retroactive surprise that there were so few explicit references to the Spanish Flu in the literature of the 1920s, the answer, to me, seemed obvious: It was hard to make all that death meaningful or interesting. Which is all just to say that I wasn’t thrilled to learn that the latest novel by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning postmodernist, was about the outbreak of a viral disease.

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