Dear Commons Community,

If you enjoy watching soccer, the United States/England World Cup match yesterday was a game for the ages.  The two teams played to a 0-0 tie but you could feel the emotion of the game throughout the ninety minutes.  Fans in the seats were cheering passionately, lots of sweat and bodily contact on the field,  but no one able to get a ball in the net.  Here is a write up courtesy of the Associated Press.

“Respect achieved. Wins await.

American players wanted more than a 0-0 draw with England on Friday night, likely the most-watched match of their lives.

The U.S. shut out a European opponent in the World Cup for the first time since 1950 yet left the tent-like stadium in the Arabian desert knowing a win in Tuesday’s politically charged matchup with Iran is a must to reach the knockout stage.

“We dominated the game. We had the more clear-cut chances. Obviously, it sucks that we couldn’t put the ball in the back of the net,” said midfielder Weston McKennie, standing out with red, white and blue streaks in his hair. “There’s a lot of people that obviously thought we were going to get blown out.”

The British tabloid The Sun ran a headline calling the result “Yawn in the USA.” England supporters booed loudly at the final whistle and American fans cheered.

“I guess that’s a positive sign,” U.S. star Christian Pulisic said. “Back home watching, I hope we made a lot of people proud.”

Playing before what figured to be a huge Black Friday television audience, the former Colonies remained unbeaten in three World Cup matches against Ye Olde Country, a run that includes the famous 1-0 upset at Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1950 and the 1-1 draw at Rustenberg, South Africa, in 2010. The U.S. had conceded goals in 19 consecutive Cup matches against European opponents until Matt Turner matched Frank Borghi’s clean sheet of 72 years earlier.

American fans outcheered England supporters, too, including a cheeky serenade of “It’s called soccer!” in the 40th minute.

“Now I’ll go back and I don’t think my Leeds teammates can say anything with all the banter they were saying before,” midfielder Brenden Aaronson said. “I think it does show that were going to get respect out of this game.”

In 2010, England dominated 14-10 in shots and 6-4 in corner kicks. This time the U.S., using five starters from Premier League clubs, led 10-8 in shots and 7-3 in corners.

McKennie had the best U.S. chance, putting an open 9-yard attempt wide from Tim Weah’s cross in the 26th minute. Seven minutes later, Pulisic bent a shot with his weaker left foot around Kieran Trippier and Bukayo Saka, and the ball glanced off a fingertip of goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and against the crossbar.

England’s best opportunity came in second-half stoppage time, when Harry Kane sliced a header wide from Luke Shaw’s free kick.

The U.S. wore blue tie-dyed uniforms in Bayt Stadium, which has a tent-shaped roof with an underside in a red-and-black carpet pattern. The interior is filled with the sadu pattern of the Bedouin.

Coach Gregg Berhalter made just one change from the 1-1 draw against Wales, replacing forward Josh Sargent with Haji Wright in just his fifth international appearance. Usually wedded to a 4-3-3 formation, Berhalter switched to a 4-4-2 that was first practiced Wednesday, according to Aaronson, who referred to it as an “amoeba.”

“Regarding changing the way the world views American soccer, we’re chipping away at it, and you need games like tonight to be able to do that,” Berhalter said. “I talked before the World Cup about how seriously the team is taking, the staff is taking this responsibility to gain momentum in this sport in America, and good performances will do that. We want to capture the public’s attention. We want to perform at a high level. We want to give them something to be proud of, and a night like tonight helps, but there has to be more to come.”

Still, the U.S. has five losses and five draws against European teams at the World Cup since beating Portugal in 2002. Looking ahead to the Iran match likely will be the huge topic of Saturday’s Thanksgiving dinner with players, family and friends.

Iran upset the U.S. 2-1 at Lyon, France, in the second game of the 1998 World Cup, eliminating the Americans. Team Melli is coming off Friday’s 2-0 upset of Wales and would advance with a win, or with a tie if Wales fails to beat England.

“All we can ask for is to have destiny in our own hands,” Turner said, “and we have that.”

Go USA! Go USA Go!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Science has a lead article this morning describing how research at the company, Meta, is experimenting with an algorithm to play the board game Diplomacy which requires strategy, tact and communications, human skills not generally seen in AI.  This is a significant advancement in  AI development and potentially a major breakthrough.  Below is an excerpt from the article.

Tony

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Diplomacy, many a statesperson has argued, is an art: one that requires not just strategy, but also intuition, persuasion, and even subterfuge—human skills that have long been off-limits to even the most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) approaches. Now, an AI algorithm from the company Meta has shown it can beat many humans in the board game Diplomacy, which requires both strategic planning and verbal negotiations with other players. The work, researchers say, could point the way toward virtual exercise coaches and dispute mediators. International chatbot diplomacy may not be far behind.

“These are spectacular new results,” says Yoram Bachrach, a computer scientist at DeepMind who has worked on the game Diplomacy but was not involved in the new research. “I’m particularly excited about Diplomacy because it’s an exceptional environment for studying cooperative AI,” in which machines don’t just compete, but collaborate.

AI has already bested humans in games of strategy such as chess, Go, poker, and the video game Dota 2. It is also proving powerful at natural-language processing, in which it can generate humanlike text and carry on conversations. The game of Diplomacy requires both. It involves seven players vying for control of Europe. On each turn, players issue orders regarding the movement of army and naval units, following discussion with other players, whom they can attack or support. Success typically requires building trust—and occasionally abusing it. Both former President John F. Kennedy and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were fans of the game.

Previous AI research has focused on a version of the game called no-press Diplomacy, in which players do not communicate. That itself is a challenge for computers because the game’s combination of cooperation and competition requires pursuing conflicting goals. The new work, published this week in Science, is the first to achieve respectable results in the full game. Noam Brown, a computer scientist at Meta who co-authored the paper, says when he started on the project, in 2019, he thought success would require a decade. “The idea that you can have an AI that’s talking strategy with another person and planning things out and negotiating and building trust seemed like science fiction.”

Meta’s AI agent, CICERO, welds together a strategic reasoning module and a dialogue module. As in other machine learning AIs, the modules were trained on large data sets, in this case 125,261 games that humans had played online—both the game plays and transcripts of player negotiations.

The researchers trained the strategic reasoning module by having the agent play against copies of itself. It learned to choose actions based on the state of the game, any previous dialogue, and the predicted actions of other players, looking several moves ahead. During training, the researchers also rewarded it for humanlike play so that its actions wouldn’t confound other players. In any domain, whether dinnertable manners or driving, conventions tend to ease interactions.

The dialogue module also required tuning. It was trained not only to imitate the kinds of things people say in games, but to do so within the context of the state of the game, previous dialogue, and what the strategic planning module intended to do. On its own, the agent learned to balance deception and honesty. In an average game, it sent and received 292 messages that mimicked typical game slang. For example, one message read, “How are you thinking Germany is gonna open? I may have a shot at Belgium, but I’d need your help into Den[mark] next year.”

Jonathan Gratch, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California who studies negotiation agents—and provided early guidance for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that is also trying to master Diplomacy—notes two technical innovations. First, CICERO grounds its communication in multistep planning, and second, it keeps its remarks and game play within the realm of human convention.

To test its skill, the researchers had CICERO play 40 online games against humans (who mostly assumed it was a human). It placed in the top 10% of players who’d played at least two games. “In a game that involves language and negotiation, that agents can reach human parity is very exciting,” says Zhou Yu, a computer scientist at Columbia University who studies dialogue systems.

Gratch says the work is “impressive” and “important.” But he questions how much CICERO’s dialogue, as opposed to its strategic planning, contributed to its success. According to the paper, Diplomacy experts rated about 10% of CICERO’s messages as inconsistent with its plan or game state. “That suggests it’s saying a lot of crap,” Gratch says. Yu agrees, noting that CICERO sometimes utters non sequiturs.

Brown says the work could lead to practical applications in niches that now require a human touch. One concrete example: Virtual personal assistants might help consumers negotiate for better prices on plane tickets. Gratch and Yu both see opportunities for agents that persuade people to make healthy choices or open up during therapy. Gratch says negotiation agents could help resolve disputes between political opponents.

Researchers also see risks. Similar agents could manipulate political views, execute financial scams, or extract sensitive information. “The idea of manipulation is not necessarily bad,” Gratch says. “You just have to have guardrails,” including letting people know they are interacting with an AI and that it will not lie to them. “Ideally people are consenting, and there’s no deception.”

Dear Commons Community,

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

If you are in New York, take in the Macy’s Parade – a tradition like no other!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The US Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee after a three-year legal fight.

The court, with no dissents, rejected Trump’s plea for an order that would have prevented the Treasury Department from giving six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.

Alone among recent presidents, Trump refused to release his tax returns either during his successful 2016 campaign or his four years in the White House, citing what he said was an ongoing audit by the IRS. Last week, Trump announced he would run again in 2024.  As reported by the Associated Press.

It was the former president’s second loss at the Supreme Court in as many months, and third this year. In October, the court refused to step into the legal fight surrounding the FBI search of Trump’s Florida estate that turned up classified documents.

In January, the court refused to stop the National Archives from turning over documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only vote in Trump’s favor.

In the dispute over his tax returns, the Treasury Department had refused to provide the records during Trump’s presidency. But the Biden administration said federal law is clear that the committee has the right to examine any taxpayer’s return, including the president’s.

Lower courts agreed that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping and only wanted the documents so they could be made public.

Chief Justice John Roberts imposed a temporary freeze on Nov. 1 to allow the court to weigh the legal issues raised by Trump’s lawyers and the counter arguments of the administration and the House of Representatives.

Just over three weeks later, the court lifted Roberts’ order without comment.

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the committee chairman until the next Congress begins in January, said in a statement that his committee “will now conduct the oversight that we’ve sought for the last three and a half years.”

In a message on his social media network, Trump said the Supreme Court’s action created “terrible precedent for future Presidents.” He accused the court of becoming “nothing more than a political body, with our country paying the price.”

He also said: “Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they always do!”

The House contended an order preventing the IRS from providing the tax returns would leave lawmakers “little or no time to complete their legislative work during this Congress, which is quickly approaching its end.”

Had Trump persuaded the nation’s highest court to intervene, he could have run out the clock on the committee, with Republicans ready to take control of the House in January. They almost certainly would have dropped the records request if the issue had not been resolved by then.

The House Ways and Means panel first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit program and tax law compliance by the former president. A federal law says the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers.

The Justice Department under the Trump administration had defended a decision by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to withhold the tax returns from Congress. Mnuchin argued that he could withhold the documents because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats for partisan reasons. A lawsuit ensued.

After President Joe Biden took office, the committee renewed the request, seeking Trump’s tax returns and additional information from 2015-2020. The White House took the position that the request was a valid one and that the Treasury Department had no choice but to comply. Trump then attempted to halt the handover in court.

Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation. That case, too, went to the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s argument that he had broad immunity as president.

Would anyone be surprised if  Trump’s IRS tax returns were leaked to the press!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For more than two years of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans looked to Fauci to dispel fear and offer reassurance — and, sometimes, to shoulder the blame for the medical establishment, which was not always nimble or forthcoming.

Many celebrated him for delivering hard truths in a comforting, avuncular demeanor. Some denounced him for defending mask requirements and vaccine mandates. Few will forget the many months during which he was the face of the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic. As reported by various news media.

“I’ve never left anything on the field,” Fauci said at yesterday’s press briefing at the White House. It was expected to be his final appearance at the podium where he was a mainstay in the spring of 2020, standing next to or behind then-President Donald Trump, urging Americans to mask and observe social distancing, and pleading with them to stay home to “flatten the curve” and “stop the spread.”

Fauci, 81, announced his retirement earlier this year, as the pandemic appeared to be on the wane. A government official since the Reagan administration, he was early to recognize the danger posed by AIDS. He became the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, a position he has held since then.

Although not necessarily shy about his accomplishments, Fauci retained the service-oriented outlook of his early Jesuit schooling in New York City, where he was born and raised. During an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in 2014 and 2015, Fauci personally treated patients. He also maintained a jogging routine that took him through the leafy neighborhoods of upper northwest Washington, D.C., where he has long lived with his wife and three daughters.

The coronavirus was his last great professional battle, one that often confounded his expectations. “I don’t think any of my colleagues imagined that we would see a three-year saga of suffering and death,” he said. More than a million Americans have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

With winter approaching, Fauci and Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House pandemic response team coordinator, urged Americans to receive their bivalent coronavirus boosters, which protect against both the original strain of the coronavirus and more recent Omicron subvariants. Reiterating a point both men have made before, Fauci said that the coronavirus can only be relegated to a background concern if Americans regularly update their vaccinations.

“We’re gonna get there,” Fauci said. “We can get there with less suffering.”

Fauci has been cheerleading, prodding, cajoling and warning for nearly three years, with mixed results that have visibly taken their toll on the once-ebullient immunologist.

The “herd immunity” he envisioned in 2020 never materialized, because new variants kept arising, finding new ways to evade the protection offered by vaccines and prior infection. As frustration with the pandemic deepened, public trust in Fauci ebbed.

This loss of confidence probably had to do less with Fauci than with the fact that it was difficult to determine which protective measures were effective and which superfluous, what to open and what to close, where to mask and where to breathe free. Did students in classrooms need to sit 6 feet apart or 3 feet? Was it safe to fly? Was it safe to hug? When could we live as we once did?

Often, it fell to Fauci to provide an answer.

“We were not dealing with a static situation,” Fauci explained Tuesday. It took months for scientists to grasp how the coronavirus spread. Initial guidance against masking from other public health officials was reversed; then, the plastic screens and other evidence of so-called “hygiene theater” gradually vanished as it became clear that the coronavirus was not spread via surfaces. It also became clear that children, for the most part, did not get seriously ill from the coronavirus, making many officials — including Fauci — rethink their endorsement of school closures in the spring of 2020.

“The recommendations that were based on what you knew in January — when you get to March, April and May, they will change,” Fauci said. “Understandably, that leads to a question on the part of the public.”

At first, Trump seemed to bask in Fauci’s confident expertise, but as the summer of 2020 approached, the president grew frustrated that the coronavirus had not been vanquished — and took his frustrations out on Fauci. He and other conservatives celebrated Republican governors like Brian Kemp of Georgia and Greg Abbott of Texas, who resisted public health advice and opened their states before the CDC recommended it.

Fauci was increasingly sidelined in favor of Peter Navarro, a hawkish economist with no medical expertise, and Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford neuroradiologist with unconventional views. Trump never heeded calls to fire Fauci, which would have been difficult to do with a public servant of his stature. But he also did nothing to discourage attacks against him.

Jha praised Fauci as “the most consequential public servant” in recent history. The last two years, however, have not been easy, with Fauci facing increasingly pointed attacks from conservatives, for example when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis urged supporters to “chuck him across the Potomac.”

During congressional testimony, Fauci developed an acutely adversarial relationship with Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-oriented Republican who opposed most pandemic restrictions. Fauci’s bouts with GOP critics are not necessarily over yet. Having won control of the House of Representatives in the congressional midterm elections held earlier this month, Republicans have indicated that they want to question Fauci about what he knows about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, a matter of ongoing dispute.

The prevailing conviction is that the disease originated in the wild, but some skeptics believe that it “escaped” from a Chinese laboratory, a hypothesis for which there is limited but intriguing evidence. Some Republicans accuse Fauci of hiding the extent of U.S. collaboration with potentially culpable Chinese counterparts, a charge that Fauci has forcefully denied.

Fauci indicated that he will comply with requests to appear on Capitol Hill. “If there are oversight hearings, I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” he said.

Reflecting on his career, Fauci especially lamented the bitterly partisan discourse on masks and vaccines, which has made public health yet another arena for enervating culture wars played out on social media and cable news.

”I don’t want to see anybody die from COVID,” he commented Tuesday. “Whether you’re a far-right Republican or far-left Democrat doesn’t make any difference to me.”

Thank you Dr. Fauci for your service.  You saved my life and my wife’s life as well as those of  millions of other Americans.

Bless you and may you have a long and healthy retirement!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

While all eyes were on the Senate and the House of Representatives on Election Day, under the radar was the fact that Democrats did very well in maintaining and gaining control of state legislatures. Democrats defended every state legislative chamber in their control this year — making it the first midterm elections since 1934 in which the party in power has not lost a chamber. 

They were also able to flip chambers in several states, a shift from previous midterm cycles where Democrats have struggled at the state level. In Pennsylvania, Democrats narrowly gained control of the state House for the first time since 2010. They flipped the Minnesota Senate and both chambers in Michigan, giving the party a trifecta in both states. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democrats prevented Republicans from gaining supermajorities, protecting Democratic governors’ veto power.

In a memo first shared with CBS News, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said the victories serve as a lesson to Democrats up and down the ballot.

“Democrats made history in state legislatures this year — defying the odds, bucking political wisdom, and laying out a blueprint for Democratic wins at the state legislative level,” wrote DLCC president Jessica Post. She credited investing early and helping local leaders and said that unlike 2010, Democrats this decade will be able to go on offense. Now, the DLCC is calling for the party to continue building from the ground up.

Post argued that some of the obstacles Democrats faced this year stemmed from GOP control of some of the nation’s state legislatures because it’s the legislature that often controls the way congressional districts are drawn.

“Democratic efforts to control the U.S. House are more difficult because of Democrats’ failure to invest in state legislatures earlier,” Post wrote. “Congressional Democrats were running in districts rigged by Republican state legislators in many states. If Democrats want to fight back against the MAGA agenda and make our country better for all Americans, that work must start in state legislatures.”

The state level successes come on the heels of redistricting. According to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), there are many reasons for Democrats’ victories in 2022 but investment in state level races was a part of it. 

“It was a big lesson of the last decade, that Democrats needed to be more focused on the states and state level infrastructure, and I think you’ve seen the party really rally to that over the last several cycles, and 2022 was the culmination of that investment,” said NDRC President Kelly Burton said.

The NDRC started its work before the actual redistricting process. Compared to the previous decade, Republican control over the redistricting process decreased by more than 20%. Burton said without such efforts, the results would have been worse for Democrats. She believes the party will continue to invest heavily on the state level because it’s paying off.

The DLCC started sending funds to legislature candidates for 2022 last fall and released its strategy identifying what it believed would be the most competitive states in the spring. In total, the DLCC raised and spent $50 million this cycle, surpassing the 2018 midterms. Its finance team also helped state partners raise more than $105 million for targets this election season. 

The memo noted two major themes were front and center during this election cycle as part of its winning strategy: abortion rights and protecting democracy. 

The DLCC recognized abortion rights would be a major factor in state legislative elections early on and launched its States to Save Roe website in January even before the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. It then continued to capitalize on the issue “at every turn.” 

The committee also worked to tie all Republicans to what it called “MAGA extremists” and warned Republicans posed an existential threat to democracy. As part of that, they took aim at state officials like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania who was in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, for former President Trump’s speech.

At the same time, candidates continued to address how they would lower costs, the memo said, blunting some of the attacks by Republicans amid soaring inflation. Some efforts included direct relief checks, tax rebates or working to cut child and health care costs.

While the DLCC is calling for the party to build off the 2022 successes, it was not alone in its efforts to increase Democrats’ numbers in the state assemblies and senates. The States Project invested nearly $60 million in state chambers, the most in a single cycle by an outside effort. 

The DLCC is now looking to 2024, helping to defend majorities as well as flip seats in states like New Hampshire and Arizona. Next year, Virginia is also a battleground with its off-year elections. 

While Republicans lost chambers in 2022 – they did see representation grow in several states. In Florida, where the party already had a trifecta, Republicans were able to gain supermajorities in both the state House and Senate. They were also able to gain supermajorities in at least one chamber in Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin. In Oregon, GOP candidates also gained seats – ending Democrats’ supermajority in the state.

Let’s hope the Democrats can keep their act together for 2024!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally’s wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered.

Oswald was arrested by the Dallas Police Department 70 minutes after the initial shooting. At 11:21 a.m. November 24, 1963, as live television cameras were covering his transfer from the city jail to the county jail, Oswald was fatally shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died. Ruby was convicted of Oswald’s murder, though it was later overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

I remember the day and hour as if it was yesterday.

Our country was never the same!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading David Corn’s new book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.  It is a review of the Republican Party’s performance during the last seven decades and examines the influences of the likes of Senator Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and of course, Donald Trump.  Corn covers a lot of ground that has been covered before.  For example, he quotes Jerry Falwell as saying:  “ I am to the right of wherever you are.  I thought Barry Goldwater was too liberal.”  Corn is a New York Times best-selling author and knows how to weave the stories of the “dark forces” and the individuals who had great influence on the ultra-conservative path that the GOP has taken.  I found it a good book not necessarily a great book.  Below is a brief review published in Kirkus.

Tony

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Kirkus

AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS

A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION OF HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WENT CRAZY

by David Corn ‧

Sept. 13, 2022

The veteran political journalist connects the authoritarianism and White supremacism of yore with the Trumpism of today.

At the 1964 Republican National Convention, liberal Republicans tried to introduce a resolution to condemn the extremism of the John Birch Society and Ku Klux Klan and were shouted down by supporters of Barry Goldwater, who said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Corn’s vivid narrative starts there, but it goes back much further, to the anti-immigrant Know-Nothingism of the 1850s, where the author locates the beginnings of a recurrent theme: Just as Abraham Lincoln could not disavow the nationalists because he needed their vote, Richard Nixon had to ally with racist Southerners, and George W. Bush had to pal around with Christian fundamentalists to win the 2000 primary against a more principled John McCain. In turn, McCain turned to Sarah Palin to placate far-right, tea party supporters, a group that morphed into the Trumpists of today. It’s a zigzag line indeed, but Corn makes important connections. “Nixon attained the presidency by exploiting the paramount divisive force in American society—racism—and the sense of fear and dread spreading through much of the nation,” he writes, and substituting Trump for Nixon makes that sentence scan without a hitch. Much of the “psychosis” of recent years has hinged on a long pattern of lies. While the author makes clear that Trump is master of the form, he had plenty of predecessors, from Joseph McCarthy to Palin’s winking insinuations that Barack Obama was a Muslim, the latter yielding what Corn calls Palinism, “a combination of smear politics, conspiracism, and know-nothingism.” Since then, it’s only gotten worse. “Formed 168 years earlier to save the nation from the expansion of slavery,” writes the author, “the Republican Party, now infected with a political madness, [is] a threat to the republic.”

A sobering look at the ideological destruction, born of cynicism and opportunism, of a once-principled party.