The New Yorker:

The toll of a destructive twelve months—and what can be done to repair the damage.

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

Paper and clocks are associated with first wedding anniversaries, or so the gift guides say. As the United States reaches the one-year mark in its increasingly dysfunctional and abuse-laden political marriage with Donald J. Trump, though, the President has made it clear that he will take almost any sort of gift—even, and maybe especially, someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize medal. The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado offered hers up to him last week, in a large gold-colored frame, ready for hanging. Although something of a pathetic gesture, given that the Trump Administration seems to have cut a deal with the remnants of Nicolás Maduro’s government (while Maduro himself is in a Brooklyn jail), it did earn her an upgrade. After Maduro’s arrest, Trump said that Machado was “a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect”; post-medal bestowal, she was “a wonderful woman” and her gift “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.” Those words might even get her somewhere, if only she had control over a lot of oil reserves. But clocks can make good gifts, too. After a group of Swiss businessmen arrived at the White House in November, bearing a desk clock in the form of an oversized Rolex, the country got a break on tariffs.

Those who aren’t trying to please the President might still keep clocks in mind this January 20th, because the country is in a countdown. Three hundred and sixty-five days of Trump means a thousand and ninety-six to go, including a leap year. (That’s not counting all the Trump first-term days, of course; this is a tragedy of remarriage.) We have aged so much in Trump years that the Biden Administration can feel much longer ago than it was. The brief era of Elon Musk running around the White House may now seem like a fever dream—he and Trump seem to have an off-and-on thing—but hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in his wake or otherwise had their lives changed irrevocably, including recipients of U.S. aid around the world. On January 1st, millions of Americans lost their health-care subsidies. Immigrants, even legal ones, live with a new level of fear. So, too, do many academics, scientists, and even lawyers. There’s an undercurrent of political violence that wasn’t present in the same way a year ago.

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