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one can divide the reaction among conservative commentators into three categories.

At one extreme sit those conservatives who championed Trump during the campaign, and still do: Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, among others. Their base is talk radio. They pride themselves on speaking for those plainspoken, dirt-under-the-fingernails conservatives who loathe not only Hillary Clinton, but Paul Ryan.

Their ideological forefathers are Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, who claimed that America’s cosmopolitan, deracinated ruling elite had betrayed the white Christians to whom the country truly belonged.

Donald Trump on Saturday called Michael Wolff, the writer of a bestselling book about his White House, “a mentally deranged author” who “knowingly writes false information”

Wolff has said he conducted more than 200 interviews and stands by all his sourcing and reporting. News outlets have pointed to inconsistencies in Fire and Fury and in past work

Kim’s Rejoinder to Trump’s Rocket Man: ‘Mentally Deranged U.S. Dotard’

Responding directly for the first time to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations to destroy nuclear-armed North Korea, its leader called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” on Friday and vowed the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

“A frightened dog barks louder,” Mr. Kim said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he vowed to annihilate North Korea if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies against it.

Trump is now the choice of voters who have concluded that of the two flawed contenders running, he would be far preferable.

Yes, he may be rough around the edges, but he’s a fresh force, the argument goes, unlike the establishment war horse, Mrs. Clinton, with her history of scandal and rumors thereof, and her decades in politics. Mr. Trump is the dynamo who will blow up the old order. He’s authentic, a man with the courage of his convictions.

It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.

The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.

He attacked his own cabinet members for not prosecuting or persecuting his political adversaries. Attorney General William Barr, Trump proclaimed, will go down in history as “a very, sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama:

Of Kamala Harris, Trump said, “she’s a communist,” calling her “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” He claimed that Biden “wouldn’t be president for two months” because “he’s not mentally capable.”

When Pence became the focal point of the mob’s rage, it crystalized a religious conflict between two competing visions of religion in politics. The mob’s focus was on power, and through power it intended to “save America” from Joe Biden and the Democrats. Trump—and the riot—were a means to an end, and the “strength” they sought was the strength to disrupt the government and defeat their hated enemies.

Pence’s focus, by contrast, was on justice—upholding the rule of law—and the courage he sought was the courage to ignore the howls of the mob and defy the demands of a deranged president to preserve his office.

upholding the rule of law—and the courage he sought was the courage to ignore the howls of the mob and defy the demands of a deranged president to preserve his office

In trying to understand how one of the most conservative members of the most conservative court in decades has come to be viewed by fellow conservatives as an enemy of the people, several possible explanations come to mind.

Derangement may be one. A mind-clouding obsession with the Affordable Care Act is another.

For decades, conservative politicians railed against the “judicial activism” of judges who overturned democratically enacted legislation, accusing such judges of seeking to use the power of the courts to impose their own political and social agendas

basically it comes down to fundamental differences between the parties and how they serve their supporters.

while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con

Things are very different among Republicans. Their party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — which even Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all.

Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission.

No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.

Americans tend to view attacks like the mass murder in Charleston as isolated hate crimes, the work of a deranged racist or group of zealots lashing out in anger, unconnected to a broader movement. This view we can no longer afford to indulge.

In recent years, extremists have distilled the notion of white genocide to “the mantra,” parts of which show up on billboards throughout the South, as well as in Internet chat rooms. It proclaims “Diversity = White Genocide” and “Diversity Means Chasing Down the Last White Person,” blaming multiculturalism for undermining the “white race.”

White nationalist leaders are traveling abroad to strengthen their international networks. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have documented more than 30 instances in the past two years.

A new poll from the Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of Americans identify states’ rights as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a remarkable finding, because virtually all American textbooks and prominent historians emphasize slavery, as they have for decades. Even more striking, the poll shows young people put more stock in the states’ rights explanation than older people. The 38 percent of Americans who believe slavery was mainly to blame find themselves losing ground.

New computer-assisted tools and techniques can find and evaluate patterns of language and emphasis, otherwise hard to see, among those debates. Researchers at the University of Richmond have developed a computerized text that allows us to explore those hundreds of speeches over time and space, to find connections buried beneath parliamentary procedure and exasperating digressions.

Some of the patterns in the speeches quickly undermine familiar arguments for Virginia’s secession. Tariffs, which generations of would-be realists have seen as the hidden engine of secession, barely register, and a heated debate over taxation proves, on closer examination, to be a debate over whether the distribution of income from taxes on enslaved people should be shared more broadly across the state. Hotheads eager to fight the Yankees did not play a leading role in the months of debates; despite the occasional outburst, when delegates mentioned war they most often expressed dread and foreboding for Virginia. Honor turns out to be a flexible concept, invoked with equal passion by both the Unionist and secessionist sides. Virtually everyone in the convention agreed that states had the right to secede, yet Unionists in Virginia won one crucial vote after another.

This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.

Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers

Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified.

It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely)

last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users

The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys

It’s a bravura performance in which war becomes farce, history becomes burlesque. Apostol thrusts us into a vertiginous narrative of “stories within stories within stories,” as the novel itself, in one of countless meta moments, has it. Another: “It will be set in 1901, or maybe 1972, or maybe 2018. … There will be unapologetic uses of generic types, actors with duplicating roles. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will seem unsolved, to some it will provide the satisfaction of unrelieved despair.”

The novel’s structure reflects how history comes at us in scattered shards, the way voices are amplified or silenced, story lines invented or forgotten. “We enter others’ lives through two mediums, words and time, both faulty,” one character observes.

But a third medium — image — is a powerful recurring motif. Apostol is obsessed with the lens, the gaze, the way victim and victor, good and evil are identified based on who holds the camera and who consumes its product

The most astonishing poll result so far this year lurks in a flash YouGov survey released this week, on the eve of yet another incomprehensible parliamentary vote. Some 20% of respondents “don’t know” if Mrs. May’s deal is good, tolerable or bad. That is up from the 17% who didn’t know what they thought in early January, before lawmakers voted down that deal the first time.

one can draw two lessons about the perils of modern electoral insurgencies.

One is that revolutions against “politics as we know it” tend to fail eventually on their inability to conduct politics as we know it

Donald Trump will propose arming school staff and raising the minimum age to purchase certain firearms to 21 in a school safety proposal the administration will release on Sunday

During his White House run, Trump touted his support for gun rights. Since the shooting last month in which 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, he has offered conflicting statements on gun policies, at times calling for new restrictions and at other times rowing back.

An NRA spokesman, Chris Cox, responded that the bill punished law-abiding gun owners for the criminal acts of a “deranged individual”.

“You don’t go to war with the commander-in-chief you want. You go to war with the commander-in-chief you have.”

Yet if any other aspect of U.S. military power were in the same damaged condition as the supreme executive authority, responsible people would pause at going to war at all. If the aircraft were inoperable, the warships unseaworthy, or the troops disaffected—wise decision-makers would refrain from deploying them.

All those instruments are in good condition, fortunately. But the person in charge is not. His severe personal legal jeopardy dominates his thoughts and deranges his behavior. That’s a strategic fact at least as real and important as the need to uphold the taboo against chemical weapons.