THE RECKONING

The former president’s niece gets in a few more licks.

There is no love lost between Trump and her uncle: “But for him, we would not have become so divided. But for him, a simple lifesaving maneuver like wearing a mask would not have become politicized. But for him, we would not have suffered a mass casualty event in this country every day, for month after month after month.” She reckons that under her uncle’s watch, the nation was forced to endure so catastrophic a trauma that, in essence, we’re all suffering from PTSD. That trauma is an old one, she writes, and here the narrative descends from political and psychological analysis to the recitation of a history that is well known: Our trauma and many of our divisions emerge from the original sin of slavery and the failure of Reconstruction. Because we have not come to terms with that sin, and because racism is resurgent, we have no chance to remedy it. Trump’s approach is a touch scattershot. She has a particular bone to pick with Robert E. Lee, whom she calls “a vile human being,” and even lays a few tut-tuts on Barack Obama for “failing to hold prior crimes to account,” from Abu Ghraib to the fast-and-loose financial shenanigans that led to the Great Recession. She’s at her best, and on the firmest of ground, when she lays into her uncle’s manifest shortcomings: “When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge, you’re more dangerous than a straight-up sociopath. Donald is much worse than that—he’s someone with a gaping wound where his soul should be.” What’s more, she insists, with good reason, the Republican Party has followed his lead as “an instinctive fascist” to become an enemy of American democracy, yet another source of our mass trauma—our rescue from which will come only with our “facing the truth and feeling the pain.”

Of value to those pondering what happened for the past five years and whether we can truly heal.