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Trump’s belittling of McCain’s torture, his gleeful enthusiasm for waterboarding, his mocking of a physically handicapped reporter, his tasteless leering at female beauty evince a man who lacks empathy. This — not his narcissism, not his lying, not his unfathomable ignorance — is his most dangerous characteristic.

Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty.

By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.

In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse.

“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”

Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

“Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.

The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

Embracing the new government, to some measure, also means buying into the disturbing worldview it sells: You can only trust a Pole — even then, only some.

EWB: Well, that’s the point, I mean, I think that’s a very honest response. But you were going to be the story anyway: Why not do an Oct. 15 release date and give voters more information for a critical decision, than Nov. 15 and not give those voters that critical information? I still don’t understand.

KELLY: You have to understand that this isn’t just “Megyn Kelly, journalist, stumbles upon a news story.” This is “Megyn Kelly, human being, woman, mother, wife, finds herself in the middle of a news story in which her safety was in danger, her children’s safety was in danger,” and I have actual responsibilities to the people who live in my home to make sure I didn’t do anything to make our situation worse, and I took those very seriously. I did not want to do anything that would chum up those shark waters I was already swimming in. And while I thought it was important to make a historical record of what Donald Trump had done — just as a matter of First Amendment issues and presidential politics, whether he won or not I thought it was important — I didn’t feel it was necessary to endanger my own safety or my children’s safety to do that

KELLY: I know, Erik, but be realistic. I have a 7-, 5- and 3-year-old. We lived under armed guard for a year. We still have an armed guard. Why would I do something that might fan those flames within a month of a presidential election? How do you think that would have gone for me and my family?

I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.

Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade

On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rule

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century

All candidates worry about pleasing their supporters or building coalitions, even as they craft policies that reflect their core beliefs. But it is striking how often public acclaim is Mr Trump’s first and last concern.

Explaining in an interview with the New York Times why it would be “nice” for America and Russia to fight Islamic State together, he imagined how, if his plan succeeded: “The people will stand up and give me a massive hand.

The president-elect reportedly argued that Mr Romney “looks the part” of a world statesman—sounding more like a casting agent than a man assembling a government.

On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference.

Mr. Trump interrupted her to declare his commitment to the Constitution — even to parts of it that do not exist, such as “Article XII.” Shock swept through the room as Mr. Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution.

Mr. Trump’s erroneous proclamation also suggested that he lacked even an interest in the Constitution. Worse, his campaign rhetoric had demonstrated authoritarian tendencies.

Even if a welfare program like the Trade Readjustment Allowance were amped up, it’s not likely that this population would become meek and grateful. They’re aware that the socioeconomic élite—lawyers, financiers, and consultants—profited mightily from the economic changes by which they were dispossessed over the past couple of decades, and I suspect that they don’t want to be the objects of such people’s charity. They want their dignity back. They want to be what they once were: workers, an independent source of economic value, ambivalently regarded by and even somewhat menacing to the upper class. As I wrote on my personal blog in May, they’d rather, if there’s no other choice, be “bad.”

These are the people who have voted into the most powerful office in the world a brittle, vindictive racist with a streak of authoritarianism. It is hard to feel generously toward them at the moment, but they need help as badly as do the people whom they have put in danger.

I suspect that working- and lower-middle-class whites feel abandoned, if not sold out, by the élites.

there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder.

To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today

All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.

What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.

Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”

His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.

Republican hostility to climate science and climate action is usually attributed to ideology and the power of special interests, and both of these surely play important roles

But I’ve always had the sense that there was a third factor, which is basically psychological.

There are some men — it’s almost always men — who become enraged at any suggestion that they must give up something they want for the common good. Often, the rage is disproportionate to the sacrifice: for example, prominent conservatives suggesting violence against government officials because they don’t like the performance of phosphate-free detergent. But polluter’s rage isn’t about rational thought.

What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.”

Do the people who support Trump realize that they are betraying not merely Muslims but the principles that the United States stands for? We don’t apply religious tests to anything

Donald Trump has taught me to fear my fellow American. I don’t mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest. I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way.

It was such a marvelous idea: the United States of America. Obviously, we’ve never really pulled it all together under one hat, but it has always seemed that at least we were striving for a more perfect union. No more. Something changed — and quickly, as history goes. Actually, everything did.

Our hyperpartisanship, augmented by incessant media coverage tied to ratings and greed, has reduced politics to a parking-lot brawl.

Demographic slicing and dicing is essential to elections, of course. Analysts and operatives are especially attached to the segmented sets of individuals, the better to objectify them into manageable parts and, thus, to predict or win elections.