According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30 percent of the population will control 68 percent of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non–college-educated voters. The 2016 electoral college results were the same as in 2020, with 232 electoral college votes for the loser and 306 for the winner. But Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percent in 2016 and Biden won the popular vote by 3.4 percent in 2020. Even in 2020, the Democrat could have won the popular vote by as much as 6 points and still have lost the election. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. The federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.
The hyper-partisan environment means that any American president will be a symbol loaded with a double meaning. She will be an icon of American leadership for half the country and an icon of oppression and illegitimacy for the other half. Symbolism matters. Countries live and die by symbols. No American president of either party, now and for the foreseeable future, can be an icon of unity, only of division.
The transition from ordinary rage-fueled American to assassin can progress gradually or overnight. “It varies from years to even days,” Ramón Spaaij says. “The police would say it almost seems to happen in the moment, so how can we ever prevent this, since the person wasn’t on our radar?” The Assassin will be one of millions wallowing in the sewers of loathing. He will live behind a screen, breathing in the fumes of hatred, occupying a dark corner in a country that has many dark corners. Guys like the Assassin are common enough. The vast majority do nothing.
What separates people who act from people who don’t? The transition moves through three stages, or “dimensions of clusters,” according to Spaaij. The first is a sudden exposure to means and opportunity, “capable of recalibrating perceived chances of success.”
The Assassin will hear about it on the radio: the President is coming to town. She has announced a listening tour and one of the stops is going to be at that fucking high school where those bitch teachers and their student pets hated him. “The time has come to heal this great country,” the Assassin hears the President saying. “And the only way we can heal is when we listen to everybody and everybody feels heard.” To the Assassin her visit feels like more than a stroke of luck. The strange man sold him a gun for what he had. Now the President’s coming. It feels like destiny. But he must keep it a secret.
The Secret Service knows that the Assassin is out there. They don’t know his name. They don’t know who he is. But they know he is out there.
Any assassin who kills a sitting US president will have to be very lucky, and he won’t succeed merely through planning. “The process the Secret Service goes through is comprehensive and proactive,” my anonymous agent tells me. “What they do is they go out and proactively do an advance, they understand the threat environment, they identify, during that advance process, every threat they can think of, and they mitigate it.” Location doesn’t matter to the Secret Service. Preparation overcomes accident. If you’re prepared, the streets of Baghdad pose no more danger than the streets of New York. “Control can come in many forms. I build control. I force control.” The President’s tour will require a constant application of control.
The Secret Service doesn’t particularly care about the quality of the weapon available to the Assassin. A .50-cal Barrett is only useful to somebody who can find the opportunity to use it—and the Secret Service excels at denying the opportunity. In almost every real situation of danger, a pistol would be just as adequate.
The second dimension that leads from general hate to political murder, according to Spaaij, is that “the costs associated with action are lowered and the costs associated with inaction are raised.” The political and the personal fuse: the Assassin recognizes that his life no longer holds any meaningful future, so he has very little to lose.
His mother brings him out of his room for another talk. “This has got to end,” she says, her eyes wet with tears, the exhaustion plumb on her face. By now he’s mastered tuning his mother out but he gets the gist of what follows. His mother wants him to move to San Jose to live with his father for a while. His father owns a sports equipment store where he can work and will pay for an apartment for a few months. “Maybe it will be a fresh start for you. Maybe you’ll be able to build something of yourself out there.”
The loathing comes over him like a hot cloud, a long burning tongue licking up his spine. Does she not understand? Does she not know that his father left them, that he stopped loving them, that he’s living with some Vietnamese bitch whose name they never even learned to pronounce, that his dad has new babies they haven’t even met? The rage comes out cold: “You fucking bitch. You fucking bitch.”
He retreats to the top floor and the internet. He types in “How far can you go in life when your mother is a bitch?” A Buzzfeed quiz pops up. His ordinary message boards are lit up with loathing for the President’s listening tour. On the Boogaloo sites, he reads that the tour is a cover for preparations to impose martial law. The bitch President is on a reconnaissance mission. A listening tour is cover for why she’s going to places that don’t want her: to establish centers of control. It’s part of the pedophile ring. The President is coming to town to organize the rape of children so she can blackmail the rapists. Everyone in power is in on it.
From the lower floor, the Assassin hears his mother whispering into the phone. “I don’t know,” she is saying. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.” She’s slowly weeping. “He’s your son, too. You’re responsible. You’ll be responsible.” Then: “No, no, no, you have to take him. You have to.”
He goes to the vent in the attic and unscrews the panel. The black gun sits there like a small black bird waiting to fly. A secret. A gun is a time machine that changes the future.
The last step involves “intensification of pressure,” according to Spaaij, a rising sense of urgency. Assassins tend to wither away in the weeks leading up to political murder. They stop talking to their families, stop responding to their emails. They give away precious objects and close out bank accounts. They detach themselves from people and objects. The reduce their lives to the roles they’re about to perform.
If the President doesn’t die soon, all of America will descend into hell. There will be no hope for decent people. There will be no life for anyone like the Assassin. There will be no future. There is no future anyway. The Assassin rolls up the posters from his walls. He takes the Rubik’s cube, the old typewriter. He wanders along his route to the library, drifts toward where the homeless have camped out. He remembers a little kid he’s seen there before. The boy lives with his father and he’s always fingering through a little box of treasures outside their tent. The Assassin has to search but he eventually finds him, staring into a phone, at the edge of the tent. He looks like he’s just been crying. The Assassin leaves him the posters and other materials. “For you,” he says to the surprised boy, and leaves.
He burns the rest of his stuff in a parking lot beside a failed shopping mall. That kid will know his name soon. He will be known. He and that homeless boy share the secret of his being.
Every morning, his mother wakes him up by knocking on his door and shouting, “We’re going to have to talk tonight,” but then she comes home and makes dinner. He comes down after she’s eaten and eats. One morning he wakes up to find a plane ticket under the door, a one-way trip to San Jose. A Post-it note on top reads: “You don’t have to go there but you can’t stay here.” There’s another Post-it note underneath that Post-it: “It’s for your own good.” What his mother doesn’t understand, what his father doesn’t understand, is that he’s a hero. They are the parents of a hero.
Every assassin has to be lucky. Gavrilo Princip, who shot the archduke Franz Ferdinand and ignited the First World War, only managed to reach his target because the archduke’s Czech driver heard the driving instructions wrong, so instead of turning onto the Appel Quay, he proceeded onto Franz Joseph Street, where Princip was waiting. The course of history is full of flukes, especially when it comes to the business of killing particular individuals.
Just before the President arrives for her listening tour stop at the local high school where the Assassin graduated, the Assassin posts a political statement. It parrots various ideologies already inundating the internet, saving all the unborn babies, preserving American liberties, keeping America great. It celebrates guns above all. The title: “A Gun Is a Time Machine for the Future.” Perhaps it will register on the Secret Service’s machine learning algorithms. Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. The agents, guiding the President to the campaign stop, will be in complete control. Advance teams will have scouted every possible approach. Every angle of threat will have been established and neutralized. Every person in contact with the President will have been vetted. Security personnel will screen all points of access. Other security personnel will scan the crowd.
The Assassin wandering toward the President, gun snug in pocket, won’t get close. There will be a crowd, both of locals and reporters, and the President stops so briefly before entering the school that she’s barely a glimpse before she’s gone. That’s it. That’s the end. That’s how much history the Assassin gets a look at. He will retreat and take comfort in a Jamba Juice across the street, a new despair settling over him. He wasn’t meant to be a hero after all.
The Assassin will have to be lucky. But he doesn’t have to be that lucky. All it would take would be for the President to decide, as she was driving away from the rally, to stop in at a Jamba Juice for a quick photo op. It’s what the Secret Service calls an “off-the-record movement.”
The Secret Service uses tradecraft to manipulate the environment in these situations as quickly as possible. They create barriers out of what’s available. “We are always going to be in a position of advantage. We are never going to put the President into a position where we are at a disadvantage,” my anonymous agent tells me. “What are the risks I’m willing to accept? Let’s take the example of the President jumping out of a car and going into a diner. Well, I have to accept the risk. There are probably people who have some kind of weapon. Maybe it’s a pocketknife. Maybe somebody has a handgun or two. For that initial move, I’m willing to accept it, and here’s why. I also have the element of surprise on my side. No one knew he was coming.” The people in the diner might have the means and the opportunity, but it’s unlikely that they have nefarious intent. “It’s such a low-probability event that I’m willing to accept that. Now, I’m only willing to accept that for a very short amount of time.” It takes only a burst.
Here is the moment that will be replayed endlessly. Multiple recordings will exist of this murder, from various surprised customers. The President extending her hand, laughing with an older couple, then the Assassin rising up with a blast from the little black Ruger, then the Secret Service tackling him.
The Assassin will need to have a good shot, with a bullet to the head or multiple to the body. “The Secret Service medical protocols are the most comprehensive in the world. Period,” the agent tells me. “There’s no other person who travels with a doctor twenty-four hours a day, with a physician assistant, combat-trained paramedic, and a nurse.” Chemical, biological, and nuclear experts ride in every motorcade. “That’s your baseline. That’s the minimum.” Beyond that extensive traveling team, agents plan out the medical contingencies of every journey, with a trauma center as close as possible. The President almost never ventures outside “the golden hour”: advanced life support within the first hour of trauma. But not even the best team can save everyone every time.
There, in the middle of some Jamba Juice, in the middle of the country, will be another assassinated President, another broken institution, another cracked symbol.
What would the aftermath of a presidential assassination look like today? “It would be incredibly pregnant with the potential for violence, because the society is so polarized,” Ronald Eyerman, author of The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination, and the world’s foremost expert on national trauma in the aftermath of assassination, tells me. Typically, when democracies confront violent disruptions to the transition of power, they rely most heavily on their national symbols and collective rituals.
In other countries as well as in other eras of American history, moments of national unity and grief followed in the wake of assassinations. After Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was murdered on a main street of Stockholm in 1986, “there was a period when party politics was put aside and the nation mourned,” Eyerman explains. The same thing happened after the assassination of both Kennedys, John and Robert. The current state of hyper-partisanship makes such solidarity almost inconceivable. “I don’t think there would be a shock and a grieving. I think there would more likely be protest and collective violence,” Eyerman says. “Then, in terms of the other representative figures, their performance in public would be extremely important.” The representative figures of American politics, as we have seen, do not do bipartisanship. Rage primes popularity. Since hyper-partisanship has already afflicted every other political ritual, like the selection of Supreme Court justices, why wouldn’t it overtake a presidential funeral?
“Especially with the history of violence in the US, and the prevalence of guns, and all the anger and frustration that’s there, a spark like that is more likely to evoke violence than grieving,” Eyerman notes. “One of the things that could happen is an institutional collapse, not only in terms of establishments but also in terms that would allow people to grieve.” The next time a president is assassinated, the streets will not feature scenes of somber reflection. The streets will fill with rage and loathing, right on the edge of control.
As noted at the beginning of this dispatch, one in eleven American presidents has been assassinated. The country has survived all those assassinations. The next assassin doesn’t matter. The president doesn’t matter, either. This thought experiment serves to establish how different the meaning of a president is now. A president was once the unquestioned representative of the American people’s will. The murder of that representative meant an assault on the nation as a whole.
Now there is no nation as a whole.
The Assassin would become a symbol, in direct inversion of the President. Just as the President would be a tyrant to half the country and an icon to the other half, the assassin would be a cold-blooded murderer to half the country and a heroic resister to the other half. The internet would throw up a fan club for him within hours. After Dylann Roof attacked the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a “Bowl Gang” formed, in reference to his bowl haircut, on the hard-right social media sites Gab and Discord. And the established right-wing polarization network applies—from the internet, through mass media, to elected officials. After seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killed Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum in Kenosha during a protest, the Republican Women of Waukesha County in Pewaukee gave his mother a standing ovation at a “safety and self-defense” event. Michelle Malkin, Republican pundit, talked to him on the phone, thanking him for his courage. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky praised Rittenhouse for his “incredible restraint and presence and situational awareness.”
The standard rituals of mourning will be followed. There will be a state funeral. The flags will fly at half-mast. But two new icons will have entered American public consciousness: the martyred President and the heroic Assassin. Meanwhile, a vice president will take over in turmoil and the sense of legitimacy in American democracy will plummet further. Who voted for him?
An assassinated president would solidify the dominance of the executive role in American government. The end result would be an ever-hardening version of soft autocracy riddled with violent grievance politics born out of a sense of institutional illegitimacy. The Assassin and the President are both products of a hyper-partisan environment. In the current context, they would only be an external expression, an allegory of the violence that is overtaking the United States as symptomatic of the electoral process in mid-failure.
Democracies are built around institutions larger than partisan struggle; they survive on the strength of those institutions. “The delegitimization of national institutions inevitably leads to chaos,” Scott Gates at PRIO says. Unfortunately, partisanship has already compromised nearly every institution in the United States. Congress has popularity numbers below 10 percent. The presidency, as it becomes less and less representative of the popular vote, loses its capacity to act with unified executive function. Since Bush v. Gore in 2000, everyone recognizes that the Supreme Court no longer represents transcendent interests of national purpose. It’s merely a collection of partisan hacks, like any other branch of the US government.
Mitch McConnell’s decision to make the appointment of a Supreme Court justice an election issue is a typical case of a political institution being converted into a token in a zero-sum game, exactly the kind of decision that destabilizes smaller, poorer countries struggling to maintain democracies. The norm of bipartisan agreement has been shattered forever and, once shattered, it cannot be put back together. Five of the nine current Supreme Court justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
The cycle of negativity that has overtaken the American political process continually undermines trust in government. “Politics inherently evokes anger in America. It’s a zero-sum game now,” Steve Webster says. Anger and distrust make it virtually impossible to go about the business of governing, which leads to ineffective government, which reinforces the anger and distrust. Because of the widening distinction—the quite correct sense that they are not us—American politics has taken on more and more radical agendas, and because government is ineffective, why not? American politics behaves like an inverse pendulum, swinging farther to the extremes. Each side, divided by negative advertising, social media, and a primary system that encourages enthusiasm over reason, pursues ideological purity at any cost, because ideological purity increasingly leads to power. The actual business of governing is an afterthought.
No institutions stand above politics anymore—not the Supreme Court, not the FBI, not the Department of Justice, not the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), not the presidency. Faith in institutions of all types is on the decline: faith in religious leaders, police officers, business leaders, elected officials, journalists, university professors. When the crisis comes, the institutions won’t be there.
After taking the oath of office, the new president will give lengthy speeches, grand rhetoric about a time to heal, to build a unified country, to recover the glories of their history. He can say whatever he wants. It won’t matter. He’ll just be the necessary monster for half the country and the necessary idol for the other half.
Americans can’t say they weren’t warned. In his Farewell Address, George Washington was almost fantastically lucid about the exact situation the United States faces at this moment. “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations…,” he warned. “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.” The greatest threat to the United States today is not the rise of the hard right. It is the general decline of legitimacy in government that underlies the rise of the hard right.
How did Washington see it? Why did he put so much emphasis of the rejection of partisanship? You have to remember that Washington gave his warning at the moment of supreme national and personal triumph. He wrote it, with Alexander Hamilton, at the end of his second term of office as he was preparing to return to Mount Vernon. His archenemy, King George III, had admitted in private that if Washington returned to his farm, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” Washington had built an extraordinary country and was in the act of handing it over peacefully. Why, at this moment of personal moral supremacy, did he choose the dangers of partisanship as his subject?
Washington must have recognized the vulnerability that he himself had helped to create, the vulnerability inherent to the glory of the American experiment. Difference is the core of the American experience. Difference is its genius. There has never been a country—in history, in the world—so comfortable with difference, so full of difference. The great insight of its founders was that they based government not on the drive toward consensus but on the permission for disagreement. They structured American government to ensure as little domination by one faction as possible.
But the United States only works if there is a tension between the forces allowing difference and the forces insisting on unity. For 250 years, American legal and political institutions provided a system through which to negotiate its incomparable competition of interests and perspectives, and they created the greatest democracy and the greatest economy in the world. Once partisan drive takes precedence over the national interest, it shreds the tension underlying the system. Unless both sides believe that they’re on the same side, they aren’t. And once shared purpose disappears, it’s gone. A flaw lurked right at the core of the experiment, as flaws so often do in works of ambitious genius.
The Farewell Address, every bit as powerful and important a document as any of the Founding Fathers’ writings, was once as popular and as studied as the Declaration of Independence. Schoolchildren across America used to memorize and recite passages. But its popularity waned after the Second World War, when shared national purpose was an easy sell. Perhaps the time has come to revive the Farewell Address. Senators and congressmen and presidents would do well to listen to what Washington had to say: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” At a Trump rally after the election, a reporter spotted a pair of Republicans wearing shirts that read, I’D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT. Centuries before, George Washington, riding out of thriving Philadelphia toward the lush hills of Mount Vernon, recognized what the failure of American democracy would look like. It looks like them.
Hate builds out of hate. Despair cascades. The rage out of which the Assassin will come is building, feeding on itself. The feeling of impotence and loss is by no means limited to one side or the other of the political spectrum. Nobody, or almost nobody, escapes the desperate trend. The parties have become consumed with defeating their opponents rather than building the country. Because of the domination of faction, government has separated from the business of policy. Meanwhile, the unifying myths and symbols that sustained the country for generations are crumbling. Explosions flare on the margins as the rot settles at the core. Hyper-partisanship shreds the party system, then it shuts down the legislative ability to enact policy, then it consumes the national symbols.
Many Americans, as well as many outside America, once believed that America was different from any other country, that it was the culmination of history, the answer to history. They imagined that America represented something more than a country, an idea, a faith. We are finding out that America is only a part of history, that it rises and falls like everybody else. Its decaying political system will leave the United States more vulnerable than ever to shock and inaction just as it enters a period of unprecedented turbulence. Its government, at the best of times, was not designed to deal with the social, economic, and environmental crises it is about to face. The breakdowns in the political and information systems matter because they make it nearly impossible for the United States to deal with the coming emergencies. The fruit of hyper-partisanship and a toxic informational environment is paralysis—paralysis at a moment of peril.
The United States will soon enter a period of radical instability as a country, no matter who is in power and no matter what policies they enact. The economic future will be more volatile. The environmental future will be more unpredictable. The cities will be more vulnerable. The government will be incapable of policy and disconnected from the people’s sense of their collective will.
As the country is torn apart by deep, intractable forces their leaders can do less and less to avoid or to mitigate, ordinary Americans will be torn apart with it.