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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.

Dispatches

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

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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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Let no one say that Donald Trump has lost his edge. His speech Wednesday evening, amid the roiling violence in the Gaza Strip, shows he’s still got it, whatever it is.

In Florida, the former president and GOP presidential front-runner blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a supposed disagreement over a 2020 U.S. missile strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. “I’ll never forget,” Trump said. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing.” He went on to praise Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that is allied with Hamas and Iran. “You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart.”

[Andrew Exum: Iran loses its indispensable man]

Trump understood that the comments would be buzzy and predicted that the press would freak out, but the more notable blowback came from other quarters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s top rivals, attacked him. “Now is not the time to be attacking our ally,” he said. “Trump puts himself first.” Other conservative leaders also reacted with disgust. Trump’s campaign, feeling the heat, put out a statement yesterday insisting, “There was no better friend or ally of Israel than President Donald J. Trump,” and another an hour later outlining pro-Israel moves he’d made during his time in office.

But trying to assess Trump as either pro-Israel or anti-Israel—or, for that matter holding any other coherent policy stance—misses the point. Trump has no true allies or ideological commitments. He is reactive, driven by personal grievance, knee-jerk contrarianism, and admiration for strength and violence. In this case, that means bearing an old grudge against Netanyahu, opposing whatever Joe Biden is doing, and being impressed by the ruthlessness of Hamas’s attacks.

The result is a series of dizzying reversals. Biden and Netanyahu, who have been at odds throughout Biden’s presidency, are suddenly marching in lockstep. The president delivered a vigorous, fiery pro-Israel speech that drew praise even from some of his usual critics on the pro-Israel right. Meanwhile, Trump and Netanyahu, close pals during Trump’s term, are feuding. (Rolling Stone reports that Trump even wants Netanyahu “impeached,” which makes as little sense as you think it does.) DeSantis and the White House are now tag-teaming to criticize Trump.

[Read: Trump isn’t the president Netanyahu was hoping for]

The contrast here is not that Netanyahu is good or that Biden’s policy is necessarily wise. It’s that Biden’s reaction is driven by a coherent and consistent worldview and approach to policy and Trump’s is driven by pettiness.

Trump is not, in any practical sense, a supporter or friend of Hezbollah or Hamas. (It’s a good bet he’d be hard-pressed to really describe their motivations other than a hatred of Israel and of Jews.) This is in part because what impresses him is belligerence and force, which is why he has previously praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, among others.

It is also in part because friendship is irrelevant to Trump. This applies just as much to his relationship with Israel as it does to normal interpersonal relationships. He saw supporting the country as politically advantageous, just as he did brokering the Abraham Accords. Trump’s relationship with the Jewish people is similarly transactional. He’s made years of anti-Semitic remarks, and on Rosh Hashanah last month, he raged at American Jews for not supporting him for election after all he’d done for Israel. (He also is unable to recognize any distinction between Jews and the Israeli government.)

Trump’s anger at Netanyahu seems to stem from the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Netanyahu congratulated Biden for his victory. In recent days, Netanyahu has praised and thanked Biden for his steadfast support. Trump demands personal loyalty even though he doesn’t give it, and he acts out of transactionalism but is horrified when other politicians do the same.

[Franklin Foer: Biden will be guided by his Zionism]

Netanyahu’s actions here are obviously prudent. Netanyahu has clashed with Biden and with Barack Obama before him over policy questions, but for any Israeli leader to be too frosty to the president of the United States, Israel’s most important ally, would be statecraft malpractice. That’s especially true at a time of war, such as now. But Trump seems to want Netanyahu to spurn Biden, the actual president, in favor of himself, a private citizen with real legal troubles and a history of electoral struggles.

No country can formulate a careful long-term policy when a future president could do an about-face at any point in his term just because he feels personally slighted. The equivocation alienates allies, who hesitate to commit to any course that could change abruptly, and who don’t enjoy being harangued by the most powerful leader in the world. It gives aid and comfort to enemies such as Hezbollah, even if Trump reviles them personally and doesn’t materially aid their causes. As Trump’s first term in office demonstrated, this petty reactivity is a bad way to govern, and it is the only way he knows.