The New Yorker:

The story of 2023 wasn’t the search for another Republican leader—but the Party’s embrace of the one it already has.

By Susan B. Glasser

Four years ago, on the threshold of a critical election year that would decide whether Donald Trump won another term in the White House, I asked a German friend, Constanze Stelzenmüller, of the Brookings Institution, to come up with one of those long Teutonic words for the state of constant, gnawing anxiety that Trump’s disruptive tenure inspired. She came back with a true mouthful, a thirty-three-letter concoction that pretty much summed it up:Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz. Helpfully, she suggested that it would be fine to shorten this to Trumpschmerz. It means something like “Trump-worry,” but on steroids. At the time, I defined it as “the continuous pain or ache of the soul” that comes from the excessive contemplation of the slow-motion Trump car crash. Well, here we go again. Headed into 2024, America is stuck with another bad case of Trumpschmerz.

At the start of this year, it was still possible to look at the facts and avoid falling back into this dark place. There were reasonable expectations that something, somehow could prevent the looming rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump but has never been acknowledged by the ex-President and millions of his followers as America’s legitimate leader. Perhaps Trump would finally face consequences for his unprecedented efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Perhaps a strong Republican challenger would emerge against him. Perhaps Biden, who spent the first year of his tenure more unpopular than any other President in the history of modern polling—aside from Trump—and is already the oldest leader in U.S. history, would step aside in favor of a younger Democrat, rather than seek a second term. But none of that happened.

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