The Abyss
We're through the looking glass. Who we once were — what we once were — is over.
I really don’t know what to write.
The first month of 2026 has provided a series of events that have simply broken my heart as well as my brain. Sure, I knew this was possible; I predicted it ten years ago. The word I came up with in the week before the 2016 election to describe a Trump presidency, when I saw it coming, was “abyss.”
Why that word?
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we live in a republic, if we can keep it. And yet, more than two centuries later, we are openly contemplating throwing it up in the air and seeing where it might land.
An abyss is being in mid-air in this rupture in our civilization.
It is where lies and truth are entirely interchangeable; where the rule of law has already been replaced by the rule of one man; where the Congress has abdicated its core responsibilities and become a Greek chorus; where national policy is merely the sum of the whims and delusions of one man; and where every constitutional check on arbitrary power, especially the Supreme Court, is AWOL. In that abyss, even an attempt to explain events through the usual rubric of covering a liberal democracy is absurd. Because that rubric is irrelevant.
And so the wheels spin.
The only honest way to describe what is in front of our noses is that we now live in an elected monarchy with a manic king whose mental faculties are slipping fast. After 250 years, we appear to have elected the modern equivalent of King George III, and are busy dismantling the constitution Americans built to constrain him.
The situation is not irrecoverable — the forms of democracy remain even if they are functionally dead. We have centuries of democratic practice to fall back on. But every moment the logic of the abyss holds, the possibility of returning to democracy attenuates. Tyranny corrupts everything and everyone — fast. David Brooks returns to the ancients today to understand where we are:
As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote. “Indeed, there comes over us an attachment to the very enforced inactivity, and the idleness hated at first is finally loved.”
Forty percent of the country still backs the tyrant. Forty percent watch this and cheer.
Let us briefly review what they are cheering. For the first time since the Second World War, the president of the United States declared last week that we no longer support the notion of national sovereignty or collective security, and reserve the right to invade and occupy other sovereign countries — even close allies — to extract their resources. Quite a Rubicon. His chief adviser declared international law a dead letter:
[W]e live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.
To put it bluntly, this was the argument of King George III. It was the justification for the British Empire, and, more hideously, for the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Europe. It’s a rejection of the principle that literally created the United States.
And yet this mad king threw this founding principle away because he believes a) we deserve Greenland as reparations for World War II, b) because Russia and China would invade otherwise, c) because rare earths are there — even though they are buried under a mile of ice — and d) because he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. Insane.
This staggering concession to evil — which cannot be withdrawn — robs us of any case against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan. It legitimizes war by major powers for conquest everywhere. It endangers the entire system of collective security that has kept the peace for nearly 80 years. Why? And for what? Because the king was on a high.
That’s where we are.
This rhetorical red line was crossed just after the king ordered another illegal armed attack on yet another country, Venezuela, and kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, on the grounds that he was trafficking drugs into America. This came only a month after the king pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted a year earlier of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and had been sentenced to 45 years in prison. How is this possible?
The king said he pardoned Hernandez solely because he had been convicted through a “Biden administration set-up” — offering no evidence to back that up — and the White House repeated this “lawfare” bullshit. But the truth is: we still don’t really know why we invaded Venezuela — because there simply isn’t a serious reason except one man’s whim and will to power.
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, the king has sent in a private army of masked anonymous men — five times the size of the police force — to terrorize the populace and round up illegal immigrants. The Fourth Amendment, we now discover, has been effectively suspended. ICE claims the right to break into anyone’s home at any time if they suspect an illegal alien with final deportation orders is inside. A judge’s warrant is superfluous. What could go wrong?
Well, this is how a 56-year-old American citizen with no criminal record was grabbed from his home by masked armed men in St. Paul last week. The anonymous men broke down his door, guns drawn, handcuffed him, took him out into the freezing cold in his boxer shorts (wind chills in the double digits below zero), and whisked him away to “the middle of nowhere” for interrogation ... before being subsequently released.
Not Siberia. Minnesota.
The one thing you could always say about a free society is that the cops do not have a right to break down your doors, grab you and detain you in the middle of the night, on mere suspicions of illegality. You could feel safe here. That simply isn’t true about America anymore.
You also knew you could express any opinion here and be safe from government persecution. Also no longer true — as foreign students have been seized, detained, and deported solely for things they have written or said. In Trump’s America, you are not safe in your home and you have to watch what you say. The two core guarantees of freedom are no longer fully operable here.
And the blithering old king at the center of all this? He went to Europe this week and poured contempt and bile on allies who sent young men and women to die in Afghanistan and Iraq after NATO’s Article V was invoked for the first and last time after 9/11:
We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this and that. And they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
How does one even respond to such an obscenity? As a proudly pro-American European by birth, maybe I feel this more acutely. But for this draft-dodging pig to erase the sacrifice of 1,160 men and women from America’s allies in the post-9/11 war on terror is a disgrace. And for what? NATO is all but destroyed for just the momentary, sick pleasure of mockery.
And, yes, all of this is now infused with a triumphant, delusional, and hyperactive mania that will only get worse. Trump’s hubris extends to his speeches, where the mood is essentially sing-songy boredom — as if to say: “Why do I even have to explain myself to these morons when my glories are so self-evident?” And so there is no preparation, no coherence — just a stream of addled, entitled, demented consciousness:
The insurance companies are petrified, so they say, “Just give them the boat. We’ll give them money instead.” And I don’t do that. We blow them right the hell out of the water. We see them going out. We blow them out of the water. We don’t have any pirates so much anymore. If we do, they won’t be there long. We’ve cut down with the hitting of the boats that are loaded up with drugs, including submarines. Can you believe they actually buy small… they’re called mini subs, very fast. They’re meant for drugs. We’ve knocked out two of them. The Democrats say, ‘They were fishing. You have ruined somebody’s fishing.’ I would say a submarine is not a fishing boat. You don’t fish. But we’ve knocked down drugs by water, the oceans, the sea by 97.2%, think of that.
And the following passages are from the beginning of the “speech” he gave this week declaring his first year the greatest in the history of the solar system:
I don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to do. I think, to me, it reads so plainly. It couldn’t be plainer. You’re allowed to do a license. Tariff is probably less severe than what a license could be. But think of it. You’re allowed to do a license. And then they have a clause at the end, something to the effect, or what is necessary, something to that effect. And what is necessary was tariffs. I don’t know where there’s a case even there …
[ICE agents are] taking rough — they’re taking rough people like this. Like all of them. We have — so we have 10,000 at least. I could have done 10,000 of them. You’re lucky I only did, like, 100. And this is just — this isn’t even the worst of the group. They have murderers. … All allowed in here by an open-border policy of the worst president in the history of our country. A man that didn’t win the election, by the way, got — it was a rigged election. Everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught him. We caught him.
The world sees this. They cannot look away. Countries that have been our allies and friends for decades and centuries are witnessing this display of mindless malice from a crazy person, and drawing their own conclusions. The selfless achievement of generations are being discarded by a senile, distracted, cowardly thug.
All of this is devastating enough. More devastating is how Americans are responding. They aren’t. They don’t really care. The president can violate two of the most cherished and basic tenets of Western civilization — that might does not mean right, and that citizens have inalienable rights the government cannot infringe upon — and most Americans just shrug. Almost every person who was outraged by the senile blather of Biden hails Trump’s senile blather as greatness, four-dimensional chess, the art of the deal, etc. The honesty required for any real democratic deliberation is completely absent. We live in a totalitarian culture of lies everywhere — but primarily from the very top. The White House doctors photos to humiliate American citizens. The lies are the point.
The world sees this too. The menace and malaise can longer be attributed merely to Trump, but to America as a whole. A critical mass of the people of this country want to tear up the Constitution in order to seek revenge and retribution on their domestic opponents and end our alliances for the shits and giggles of pissing on the entire world. Their hatred and resentment of others eclipses anything that might remotely called love of country. They want this president and they want his madness and they want the destruction he will bring. And they will, I fear, experience that destruction soon enough — good and hard, as Mencken might have said. Because God knows what’s coming next.
All we can do now — as this abyss engulfs us — is to tell the truth about it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a long chat with Kevin Williamson on the perils of populism; lots of listener comments, including dissent; reader dissent over my column on Greenland; 12 notable quotes from the week in news, including two Yglesias Awards; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a finger-painted music video as a Mental Health Break; an architectural window view from Mexico; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new subscriber:
I enjoy your perspective even though I often disagree. I also admire your command of the written word.
Another newcomer writes, “You think and communicate like a normal person.” One more Dishhead:
I had allowed my previous paid subscription to lapse, primarily because I have too many subscriptions for my current situation. But your column “The Permanent Stain” and your tribute to Pope Francis brought me back to. I value anyone who is saying, clearly and directly, “Wake up, see what is happening. It might be the end.”
New On The Dishcast: Kevin Williamson
Kevin spent 15 years as a writer and reporter for National Review, worked as a theater critic at The New Criterion, and had a long career in local newspapers. He’s currently the national correspondent at The Dispatch and a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He’s the author of many books, including Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.”
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the arc from the Tea Party to Trump, and now his Greenland travesty. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod with Charlie Sykes on the mob-boss presidency. Readers also discuss the ICE raids and the Greenland fiasco, including a reader in Denmark who admits he misjudged Trump.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jeffery Toobin on the pardon power, Jason Willick on trade and conservatism, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right’s future, Derek Thompson on the Dems and abundance, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy, and Michael Pollan on consciousness. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader writes:
Great commentary about Trump and Greenland … until you got to Netanyahu, Gaza, and the West Bank. It’s a cheap shot to lump Netanyahu, a democratically elected leader, with Putin and Xi and the worst instincts of Trump with Greenland.
Following five wars begun by Hamas — and after Israelis evacuated Gaza — Israelis have had an elegant sufficiency of terrorist attacks from its southern border. That’s why they’ve spent the past 27 months trying to quell Gaza and destroy Hamas. The comparison to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi’s monomaniacal pursuit of Taiwan is absurd. To follow your logic, it would be as if your comparison implies that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was defensive against an attack by its neighbor and Xi needs to take ownership of Taiwan because Taiwanese have been wantonly killing the Chinese.
As for the West Bank, it dates to the start of Judaism (Judea and Samaria), and like so many other acres of real estate in the Mideast, it was partitioned and repartitioned by colonial powers beyond recognition.
That last sentence sounds exactly like Dugin with respect to Ukraine. I’ve long understood that the slightest attempt to avoid double standards with Israel is always greeted with outrage in the in-tray — and cancelled subscriptions. It won’t deter me. I’m not looking for a $150 million payout from the Ellisons. But please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Another dissent on last week’s column is here, and more criticism is on the pod page. You can follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Greenland fallout, crypto corruption, and “digital nihilism.” Examples:
Sebastian Junger reflects on how the Democrats lost young men.
Jill Filipovic covers the sexist undercurrents of ICE.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a sleuth from last week’s contest:
I immediately recall a scene in the movie Secretariat, where Penny Chenery (played by Diane Lane) lost a coin toss and needed to wait for the other side to pick first in a two-way foal selection:
While the other side went with the championship accolades of the sire and dam, Penny happily chose Secretariat for his amazing granddam, named Imperatrice. Horse breeders are essentially practicing geneticists. Penny’s intuition, which landed her the Triple Crown winner, was that the female side contributes as much as the male side, and sometimes a hereditary gift can “hop” a generation.
Roger Ebert explained it further:
Secretariat was not a lucky roll of the dice by the blind watchmaker, but the outcome of many carefully recorded generations of selective breeding. ... Nor did Penny Chenery, Secretariat’s owner, “luck into” the horse. As the film spells out, she won the horse by losing a coin toss, which she wanted to lose, because her understanding of horse breeding led her to hope the millionaire betting against her would “win” the wrong mare. Her reasoning was correct.
See you next Friday.