On this episode of “Sway,” Kara Swisher speaks to Chris Best, the chief executive and a co-founder of Substack, about content moderation on his platform and asks whether Substack is going to destroy media gatekeepers or just turn into one of them.

The benefits have been real: in terms of lives saved, of course, and also in terms of politics, economics and prestige. To some, China has come to seem as something of a “new safe haven”; it was also the only major economy to register growth last year.

China’s comparative success at containing the coronavirus has put it in a bind: The population feels much safer than it should even as it remains very vulnerable to infection and is likely to for quite a while longer.

The future of American democracy depends on our defusing that bomb — together.

But if those systemic problems made Trump president, the more visceral shock of the pandemic and the visceral incompetence (and worse) of his administration have created a space where a meaningful majority of Americans may be satisfied with recovery, normalcy, a phase of decadence that feels depressing but not dire.

Donald Trump began his term from the same rostrum in 2017, decrying the “American carnage” caused by urban poverty, lost manufacturing jobs, drugs and crime. After four years of Mr. Trump waging ceaseless battle against his political opponents,

Mr. Biden’s call for unity was not a demand that Americans agree, but rather that they live in mutual tolerance, recommitted to the democratic process and to peacefully adjudicating their differences until the next inauguration. All Americans should be able to agree on that.

The focus on the national party committee comes as Democrats attempt to navigate a deeply uncertain political landscape.

He is also well-known to staff and members of the D.N.C., a result of his work heading the South Carolina state party and a failed bid to become chairman of the committee in 2017. (Tom Perez, the outgoing D.N.C. chair, won that race.) Mr. Harrison has been championed by Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, an influential Biden ally who helped the president-elect win the primary race in Mr. Clyburn’s home state. Mr. Perez opted against running for a second term.

Gail: New York prosecution has some advantages: no worries about the president prepardoning himself on the way out the door. Don’t know if that’s possible anyway, but it definitely wouldn’t work on nonfederal charges.

President Trump has shamefully pardoned four of the perpetrators, upending this valuable example of accountability.

Social media posts from the event also showed live performances by Teri Nunn, the lead singer of the 1970s and ’80s new-wave band Berlin, famous for the song “Take My Breath Away,” and two members of the Beach Boys, who now perform without the founding members Al Jardine and Brian Wilson.

Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, unexpectedly returned to the White House hours before the party, which he had originally planned to attend. It was unclear why Mr. Trump flew back to Washington, where he has not appeared in public since his return.

“Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need,” he wrote. “Not fair, or smart!”

She said she gets frustrated when she hears about young people flouting social distancing rules. “I think, ‘Because of you guys, I’m stuck in my room. I would like to put you in my room for a week and see how you like it.’”

We waited until 4 p.m. for another test result, also negative, and I got her soon after. She had two bags packed and was practically running out the door — away from the boredom, loneliness, scary and confusing events, unknown staff members with covered faces.

When Covid-19 hit, all family visits were halted. Dorothy was OK at first, already accustomed to the staff feeding her twice a day. But after a while, I think it hit her. Her family was gone. We could not tell her why or where they were. We could not reassure her, although we tried.Dorothy slowly went downhill, and in July, she died. She is the collateral damage, the many who decline simply from the isolation and loss of routine, but most important, from the loss of the people who love them. She was one of many here, and she deserves a voice.

My mother is fortunate that she is in an assisted-living facility that cares. It adheres to the guidelines. Unfortunately, the very rules that keep its residents physically protected do not support their emotional health. There are no easy answers.

That’s an astonishing failure — one that stands out in a year of astonishing failures. The situation is made grimmer by how familiar the underlying narrative is: Poor coordination at the federal level, combined with a lack of funding and support for state and local entities, has resulted in a string of avoidable missteps and needless delays.

The implementation of these shots is complicated by a number of factors, including cold-storage requirements, which in turn necessitate special training for nurses and doctors. Training takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in most states. Some hospitals have said they don’t know which vaccine they are going to receive, or how many doses, or when.

Our last economic crisis was followed by a sluggish recovery. Employment didn’t return to 2007 levels until 2014; real median household income didn’t regain the lost ground until 2016. And many observers expect a replay of that story, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate and engage, once again, in economic sabotage under the pretense of being fiscally responsible.

Sharon Wallace, 62, whose multiple sclerosis landed her in a Rockland County, N.Y., nursing home several years ago, said that an unattended rash recently turned into an open wound, and she described feeling lonely and trapped in quarantine. “I feel like my health is going downhill,” she told me.

“Nursing homes are really little hospitals, yet they’re not staffed like it. If you asked an I.C.U. nurse to take care of 15 people, she’d laugh at you, but that’s essentially what we have,”

Joe Biden is about the age of the average nursing home resident. Over the summer, he announced a $775 billion proposal to provide care for children, seniors and people with disabilities. The plan, though notional at this point, would eliminate the 800,000-person waiting list for long-term care under Medicaid and pay for 150,000 new community health workers for seniors. It could also help transform millions of low-wage, high-turnover, often transient gigs into stable careers.

“The stress is ungodly,” she told me. “Every day you go there, your family pays for it when you get home.”

They would thus serve the twin aims of ensuring that the “energy in the executive” that Alexander Hamilton defined as “a leading character in the definition of good government” is nonetheless embedded, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. rightly insisted, in a “system of accountability that checks the abuse of executive power.”

The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.

After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”

Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.

One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.

The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.

The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.Gift Subscriptions to The Times, Cooking and Games. Starting at $25.And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.

As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. (It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.

And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.

Outside experts said they doubted it was China, which has been accused of trying to steal vaccine information from universities, hospitals and medical researchers, because it would be unlike Chinese hackers to impersonate executives at a major Chinese firm.

If they are correct, the lead suspects would be hackers in Russia and North Korea, both of which have also been accused by the United States of conducting attacks to steal information about the process of manufacturing and distributing vaccines. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between official hacking operations for the Russian or North Korean governments and those run for private gain.

The attackers’ emails were addressed to companies that provide key components of the cold chain process. Those include ice-lined boxes for vaccines and the solar panels that can power refrigerated vaccine containers — an important feature in poor countries where electricity can be scarce.

There is no indication so far that the attackers were aiming at Pfizer or Moderna, whose vaccines are expected to be the first ones approved for emergency use in the United States.

“It’s one thing to think that you don’t trust the guys in Washington because they’re not your party,” said Lonna Atkeson, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico. “But it’s a whole other thing if you think, ‘Well, gee, they didn’t even get there legitimately.’”

“There’s a set of people who are true believers that Donald Trump won the election and is going to be inaugurated, but that’s a relatively small set,” he said. “There’s also a small set of people who acknowledge Joe Biden won, but not nearly as many as you would hope.

Still, only about 20 percent of Republicans said they considered a Biden victory the “true result.” And 49 percent said they expected Mr. Trump to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 — a belief that’s “unreasonably optimistic” at this point,

For other voters, what they sincerely believe and what they want to be true may well be the same thing. And politics can be inseparable from that reasoning.

“In 2000, people had the sense that there was an unfairness in the process that had to do with technology; it wasn’t driven by partisan politics,” said Betsy Sinclair, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And there was a sense that we could fix that problem, she said, with updated voting machines and new legislation.

About 40 percent wanted him to take the latter option if he lost in the Electoral College and lost the national popular vote by only a percentage point or two. But roughly the same share wanted the president to contest the election even if he lost the popular vote by 10 to 12 points. That suggests, Mr. Schaffner said, that a significant share of the president’s supporters don’t necessarily believe the election was fraudulent. Rather, they were prepared to support the president’s contesting of the election no matter what.

They probably have more faith in their local election workers and precinct offices than these surveys suggest they have for the country.

She got 100 percent of the questions right and on Oct. 23 she was presented with her citizenship papers and a small American flag during a drive-through ceremony in a parking lot beside the Albany airport. The next day, she told me, she voted in the presidential election.

“Who does a U.S. Senator represent?” The only acceptable answer has been changed from all people of their state to citizens of their state. I’m just a person, not a citizen. Am I not worthy of representation?

Some people have an easier ride. If you are 65 or older and have 20 years of permanent residency under your belt, you are required to answer fewer questions. This makes me feel better about the substantial errors made by the 66-year-old senator-elect from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville. In an interview this month in The Alabama Daily News, Mr. Tuberville got the three branches of the federal government wrong and misidentified the reason the United States fought in World War II. To be fair, Mr. Tuberville played football for a long time. It is my understanding that this extremely American game involves repeated bashes to the head, one of which is bound to knock out some civics knowledge.

What is Alexander Hamilton famous for?” He’s famous for his cool ponytail and for being a breakout star on Broadway, right? Wrong. Apparently he’s famous for being “one of the writers of the Federalist papers.” Not sure what those are, but they sound serious.

Mr. Prieto treasures that knowledge, but is not convinced that the test itself is helpful. “I don’t know that we need to have a formal test, with 128 questions that you need to learn, and get 12 of them right,” he said. “Do we really need that? What is important for a new citizen is to know their rights and their responsibilities. That is what levels them with other citizens.”

In some states, every county may have certified its results already, but it won’t be listed as complete until the state canvassers sign off.