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Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues—and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Israel is walking into a trap. The progressives who flunked the Hamas test Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness. Computers are learning to smell.

One Single Day

Regret about “what might have been” is not a particularly productive emotion. Counterfactual history, however, is quite useful. I have used it for years in teaching international relations, to help students see that not everything in history is inevitable, that accidents and sudden turns can change the destiny of nations.

Also, as a science-fiction fan, I’m a sucker for the alternate-history genre, the kind of stuff where the Roman empire never rises or America loses the Revolutionary War. I loved NBC’s show Timeless, in which a team—including an academic historian!—has to run around stopping time-terrorists from messing with great events. I even liked Quantum Leap and the idea of one man traveling through the years to fix individual lives rather than alter the grand march of time.

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

I recognize that others will depict Trump’s victory as the inexorable result of long-term trends. Some, perhaps, would identify 1994, when Newt Gingrich proved that political nastiness was an effective campaign strategy, as the Year of No Return, or the election of 2010, when Americans rewarded the flamboyant jerkitude of the Tea Party with seats in Congress.

There’s a lot of truth to such explanations. Long-term trends matter, because over time, they frame debates and shape the choices available to voters. The Republicans have been moving further and further to the right, but I have always argued that 2016 was a fluke, a perfect storm with epochal consequences: The GOP field was fractured and feckless; Trump was a well-known celebrity; the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton instead of supporting Joe Biden for a shot at what would have been Barack Obama’s third term. And it was close, because of the structure of the Electoral College. (The headline of an article by Tina Nguyen, written a few weeks after Trump’s win, captures it nicely: “You Could Fit All the Voters Who Cost Clinton the Election in a Mid-Size Football Stadium.”)

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach.)

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans—a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat. There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016.

An irony in thinking through the 2016 counterfactual case is how many people, including Trump and the herd of sycophants who coalesced around him, would have been better off if Trump had lost. Excellent books by the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris and by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich have described the kind of people who formed up behind Trump, and it is striking how many of them are now facing personal and political ruin. Perhaps someone like Seb Gorka feels that he did well by jumping from academic obscurity to fish-pill sales, but others whose associations with Trump opened the door to greater scrutiny and eventual disaster—think of Matt Schlapp, Peter Navarro, or even the pathetic Rudy Giuliani—would all have been better off had Trump had flamed out.

But no one should wish for the Guardian of Forever to open a gate back to 2016 more than Trump himself. Had he lost, he could have fulfilled what was likely his true wish, to go back to his life in New York as a faux-capitalist fraudster while traveling the country as a pretend president, holding rallies and raking in money from credulous rubes. Instead, he faces humiliation, financial failure, and criminal indictments.

Measures such as impeachment that could have taken Trump out of American political life were destined to fail because of 2016. The 2020 election proved Trump’s toxicity, but by then, too many Republicans had made too many compromises and they could no longer just walk away. Their fates (which for some might include prison) are sealed.

All of this chaos and misery was avoidable—and all of it stemmed from one election and the choices of a tiny number of Americans who could have averted these disasters. As Trump tries to regain his office, voters should remember that nothing is inevitable: Choices matter. Elections matter. A single day can matter.

Related:

What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers

Today’s News

Palestinians are fleeing northern Gaza after the Israeli military ordered more than 1 million people to evacuate; the United Nations has called the evacuation “impossible … to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Representative Steve Scalise backed out of the race for speaker of the House yesterday. Jim Jordan has been nominated to succeed him. Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative deal with its health-care workers after a three-day walkout.

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The Books Briefing: Mary Gabriel’s new biography documents Madonna’s indelible position in pop, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Watch. Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or–winning film, Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters), is an emotional puzzle that will keep you guessing.

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P.S.

Speaking of alternate histories, a year ago, I suggested that you watch Counterpart, which I said then was “the greatest television series that not enough people have seen,” and which I think has been unjustly ignored as one of the greatest series in the history of television.

Counterpart ended its two-season run in 2019 (you can stream it on Apple TV+ and Amazon), so I’ll reveal a bit more of the plot: Scientists in East Germany at the end of the Cold War accidentally open a portal to a parallel universe. It is at first identical to ours in every way, including the people in it, but different choices make them into different people. The show asks disturbing questions about how our lives, and even the fate of the world, can change because of one decision. The lead character, Howard Silk (an amazing performance by J. K. Simmons), often has discussions with his “other,” his counterpart. One Howard is a tough, bitter bastard; the other is a kind and loving husband. When one Howard says that he wonders how things in life could go so wrong, the other Howard says, “Or so right?” Later, Howard says, “We all would like to be the better version of ourselves. I just—I just don’t know if it’s possible.”

The series is full of such moments, along with wonderful little touches of weirdness. (Over in the parallel universe, Prince is still alive.) It might just be a TV series, but even now I still think about it, which is the highest compliment I can pay to good entertainment.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The opening scene of Anatomy of a Fall achieves a rare, special kind of disorientation, one baffling enough to make the viewer question reality. Did I arrive late? I wondered, even though I knew I’d been sitting in the theater when the house lights had gone down minutes prior. Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller), a writer, is being interviewed in her home by a graduate student about her work. But it’s nigh impossible to parse the questions and answers, or the subtly flirty vibes between interviewer and interviewee, because loud music is blasting all through the house, something they try to ignore but eventually acknowledge as insurmountable, postponing the conversation until later.  

Sandra’s husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is working upstairs in the attic, playing music on a huge speaker, but we don’t see him, and his motivation for such obnoxiousness is never explained. If Sandra is annoyed, she barely shows it; the viewer mostly identifies with the poor graduate student, mercifully excused from a dynamic loaded with tension. Only as Anatomy of a Fall progresses does it become clear that this opening scene exists not to land a confusing blow, but to dump a puzzle in the viewer’s lap: an emotional mystery that ends in Samuel’s shocking and seemingly inexplicable death.

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This movie, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or–winning thriller, co-written by Triet and Arthur Harari, is somewhat of a whodunit. After this bizarre interview gets cut short, Sandra and Samuel’s blind teenage son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), takes a walk through their French mountain town with his seeing-eye dog. When he returns, he finds his father sprawled on the snow, dead, having fallen from the attic and suffered a blow to the head. Sandra is swiftly arrested as the only suspect, and a court case ensues, with Sandra striving to prove her innocence and get to the bottom of what exactly happened to her husband.

But Triet, wisely, does not approach the movie as a fictional facsimile of a true-crime tale, a sifting of forensic evidence and police examination. Rather, this is an emotional excavation, one that seeks to untangle the strange mess of clues laden in that opening scene. What could cause a partnership to deteriorate into such awkward hostility, and are those marital resentments enough to explain someone’s death? Triet’s movie has elements of lurid, intimate courtroom dramas from the early ’90s, such as Presumed Innocent and Reversal of Fortune. But it has a streak of art-house intellectualism, turning past arguments over household responsibilities or creative frustration into nail-biting thrill rides.

The film’s greatest strength is Hüller, a German actor probably best known for her wonderful leading work in the comedy Toni Erdmann. Hüller manages to portray Sandra as a total enigma while retaining the audience’s sympathy throughout. She appears baffled by her husband’s death and insists that she wasn’t involved, but is also clearly hiding all kinds of problems in their relationship, afraid that they’d implicate her even more were they revealed. A celebrated author and polyglot who deftly switches between German, French, and English while she’s being interrogated on the stand, she’s the kind of heroine that’s easy to root for but just as easy to envision being at the center of a dramatic twist.

Triet teases out details in flashback through the long and involved ceremony of the French legal system. It’s a curious setup that I can describe only as a sort of extended town hall, one where defense attorney, prosecutor, judge, and witness are invited to cross-talk at all times. Sarcasm is welcome; badgering the defendant is practically encouraged. To an American viewer like myself, it’s a boundlessly fascinating window into a different courtroom culture, but it’s also a terrific narrative vehicle, allowing Triet to dive into the tense history of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage—and their respective relationships with Daniel—as everyone struggles to get to the truth.

The compelling crux of the movie lies in that opening scene, and in how so many crimes rest on guesses at people’s emotional states, parsing nuances and packaging them into accusations. Some of the details of Sandra and Samuel’s marriage are specific—they’re both writers, but she is the far more successful one, which has led to resentment over the years. They’re both racked with guilt over their son becoming blind after an accident but are processing it in different ways. Still, these are all essentially universal pressures: marital strife, parental stress, work anxiety. Triet skillfully spins the viewers’ sympathy into a worst-case scenario, literally putting these feelings on trial, and it serves to compound the excitement. It’s a simple question, really: What if a domestic drama got crossed with a courtroom thriller? Anatomy of a Fall is the glorious answer.