Washington Hasn’t Prepared for Possible Return of Trump

Michael Schaffer: “If Trump does retake the presidency, he’ll be returning to an office that differs ‘minimally, if at all’ from the one he occupied during his chaotic term, in the words of Ian Bassin, whose Protect Democracy nonprofit is one of the capital’s highest-profile institutional-reform outfits.”

“Though that grim reality has been well-known to folks who followed the reform efforts in 2021 and 2022, it’s been lost on a larger Washington population that spent those years focused on the pandemic, inflation, Jan. 6 investigations and other more pressing subjects. A number of reform advocates told me this week that they’d started getting alarmed phone calls from folks whose interest in the state of guardrails had suddenly rebounded after a Washington Post poll suggested Trump really might win (and a Trump CNN town hall demonstrated that he was just as determined as ever to shred political norms).”