by Jeffrey Goldberg
WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE 2020
On a bright May day in 2018, I walked from The Atlantic’s Washington, D.C., offices at the Watergate complex to the White House for lunch with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. I knew Kushner slightly; he was not fond of me, nor I of him, but he had something he needed to say, and journalism is journalism. Kushner’s self-confidence is more impressive than his achievements, but unlike his father-in-law, who is pathologically bored by matters of policy, spherically ignorant, and unequipped for even simple intellectual challenges—all qualities that eventually brought America to the edge of the abyss—Kushner at least has the ability to assimilate new information. Well before Trump was inaugurated, Kushner had become one of the key officials tasked with devising administration policy—someone had to do it. During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., had tried to recruit John Kasich, then the governor of Ohio, to be his father’s running mate. Kasich was promised control over foreign and domestic policy. This caused some confusion, there being no other policies to make. The question was asked, What would Trump be in charge of? Don Jr. answered: “Making America great again.”
The ostensible subject of my lunch with Kushner that day was diplomacy. Trump had asked his son-in-law to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Kushner had devised a plan, which he wanted to discuss with me. The particulars of the plan were declared off-the-record, but suffice it to say that, as of this writing, Kushner has not brought peace to the Middle East.
The memorable part of our conversation came a bit later. Like many Americans, I had been preoccupied by Trump’s moral and intellectual defects since he emerged as a figure of political significance. It was these defects that had prompted The Atlantic, a year and a half before my White House meeting with Trump’s son-in-law, to endorse his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for president. This had not been, for us, an obvious decision. The Atlantic’s founders, including among them such great figures of 19th-century letters as Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had promised readers that their magazine would be “of no party or clique.” Political endorsements across our long history have been rare. The magazine supported Abraham Lincoln’s candidacy in 1860 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s candidacy in 1964. As we thought through our dilemma, we realized that had Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio (or, really, almost anyone else) been the Republican presidential nominee, we would not have considered making an endorsement of any sort. Our concern was not mainly over Trump’s ideas, such as they were. His manifest character failings were what prompted us to declare for his opponent. We wrote, in an editorial published in October 2016, that Trump
has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He 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.
By the spring of 2018, it had become clear that we had understated the case against Trump. As a reporter, I had covered his two predecessors. They were very different men with very different records; one came to office as a direct consequence of the other’s mistakes. But George W. Bush and Barack Obama each took the presidency seriously; each man was changed by the office; each viewed himself to be president of all the people. One of Trump’s true innovations as president is to feel no responsibility for Americans who didn’t vote for him. Unlike previous presidents, he works not for reconciliation but for division. On his best days, Trump is numb to the fault lines that run under America—fault lines of region and religion, of class, ideology, and race. On his worst days, his presidency is an inversion of the motto of the United States. E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—has become, in our tormented era, “Out of one, many.”
Another quality of Trump’s, and one I would raise with Kushner, is his bottomless vulgarity. No president since Andrew Jackson—whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office—has been so devoted to crudeness, both as a weapon and as an art. I mentioned to Kushner in plain terms my feelings about a recent burst of presidential boorishness and noted my view that his father-in-law was bringing discourse in America down to the coarsest level. Kushner, surprisingly, agreed. “No one can go as low as the president,” Kushner told me. “You shouldn’t even try.” He said this with a satisfied smile. It took me a second to realize that Kushner was paying Trump a compliment. To Kushner, Trump’s indecency was a virtue. The chasm between us felt, at that moment, unbridgeable. We were in the White House; Abraham Lincoln once lived here, the Lincoln who said, in his first inaugural address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” As I walked through the West Wing with Kushner, my thoughts concerned a White House defiled.
How did we get here? How did our politics become so appalling and dispiriting? How did a system meant to elevate the most qualified among us instead place a grifter in Lincoln’s house? How did the gaps between rich and poor, men and women, black and white, immigrant and American-born, become so profound? How did the leader of the richest nation on Earth fail to protect his country from a deadly virus he was repeatedly told was coming? How could a leader be so thoroughly insensate to certain unforgiving realities of black life?
The story is larger than Donald Trump, and not simply because a grifter is actually powerless without an audience ready to be grifted. America has become unmoored from truths formerly self-evident—from the animating ideas of its creation, as articulated in our country’s founding documents.
On the morning after Trump’s election, I told the staff of The Atlantic that our magazine had a special responsibility in times like these—times of tension, and fracturing, and loss of national meaning. The magazine’s 1857 manifesto, the one vowing that we will be of no party or clique, made another promise to our readers: that we would align ourselves with the forces of “Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private.”
Throughout The Atlantic’s long history, our writers and editors have tried to live up to this ideal by pursuing journalism that is true, meaningful, and consequential. Our best writing has explained America to itself, and to the world; has advanced the twin causes of knowledge and reason; and has been a proponent of science, literature, and art. It has had as a guiding principle the idea that America will always be imperfect but is designed with self-improvement in mind. One prerequisite for national betterment is a commitment to debating and illuminating America’s meaning and purpose.
The Atlantic was, from its birth, a frank partisan of the abolitionist cause and of the general cause of justice. It published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in order to raise the spirits of Union soldiers, and it published Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction and racial justice. Our magazine published Theodore Roosevelt on the need for clean government and John Muir on the case for national parks. It published Jacob Riis on poverty, Helen Keller on the cause of women’s empowerment, Alfred Thayer Mahan on the importance of America’s global reach, and Albert Einstein on the atomic bomb. In our pages—in 1945—Vannevar Bush predicted the coming of the internet. The Atlantic is also where Martin Luther King Jr. published what came to be known as “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” written by hand behind bars after his arrest in 1963.
The pace of The Atlantic’s contributions to the national conversation has only accelerated in recent years. That is why we have decided to publish an anthology of some of our best writing about this vexed era. When we first thought to create the book you are now reading, one of my chief worries concerned chaos. The Atlantic publishes thousands of articles, in print and online, each year, on a near-infinite range of subjects. Could we find coherence in the cacophony?
The answer is a definitive yes. Our editor at large, Cullen Murphy, expertly led the effort to organize the book along discernible lines. We open with articles about this period of intense, destabilizing social change. We move to the causes of political division, then look carefully at the man who personifies the dangers of the moment. Finally, we explore what recovery might look like, and the virtues that must be rediscovered if recovery is to happen.
I write this in June of 2020, in a Washington coming out (permanently, I hope) of pandemic lockdown, but also under police curfew. The mood in the country is grim, justifiably. But if a careful reading of The Atlantic through the years can teach us anything, it is that hope is as much a salient theme of American life as despair. Only by examining who we are, and by studying the consequences of our actions, do we have a chance of lighting a path out of our current crisis.