50 Moments That Define an Improbable Presidency

January 15, 2019 Philip Waring Leave a comment

by Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in chief of The Atlantic
January, 2019

In an October 2016 editorial, The Atlantic wrote of Donald Trump: “He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar.” We argued that Trump “expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself.” Trump, we also noted, “is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”

In retrospect, we may be guilty of understatement.

There was a hope, in the bewildering days following the 2016 election, that the office would temper the man—that Trump, in short, would change.

He has not changed.

This week marks the midway point of Trump’s term. Like many Americans, we sometimes find the velocity of chaos unmanageable. We find it hard to believe, for example, that we are engaged in a serious debate about whether the president of the United States is a Russian-intelligence asset. So we decided to pause for a moment and analyze 50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency to date.

Our 2016 editorial was a repudiation of Donald Trump’s character as much as it was an endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. It was not meant to be partisan. The Atlantic’s founders promised their readers that we would be “of no party or clique.” This remains a core governing principle of the magazine today. What follows is a catalog of incidents, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance. In most any previous presidency, Democratic or Republican, each moment on this list would have been unthinkable.

50. Donald Trump touches the magic orb . By James Parker

49. A Cabinet officer likes private planes too much. By Elaina Plott

48. The president praises the congressman who body-slammed a reporter. By David French

47. An overcompensating press secretary lies about crowd size. By Megan Garber

46. Trump tells the Boy Scouts about a hot New York party. By Yoni Appelbaum

45. A name-calling feud ends with the secretary of state’s ouster by tweet. By Yara Bayoumy

44. The WikiLeaks president goes silent. By George Packer

43. The nation loses its consoler in chief. By James Fallows

42. The first president to complain about an election he won. By David Graham

41. Trump waits 19 months to pick his science adviser. By Ed Yong
40. The president’s most trusted adviser is his own gut. By Sarah Zhang

39. A White House economist creates facts for the president. By Tom Nichols

38. Trump holds a top secret confab on the Mar-a-Lago dining terrace. By Ian Bogost