Andrew Sullivan on Donald Trump

“Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It's long past time we started treating him as such.”

“But we do know for a fact that Trump is criminally inclined, driven by vengeance and rage, and has now been granted vague and unprecedented immunity powers by SCOTUS whose limits he will doubtless exploit. We know he will delegitimize any institution that gets in his way; and we know that electing a convicted felon who has already once tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power will be a watershed for a purported republic.”

“No one claimed fraud. No one derided the lopsided unfairness of the parliamentary results, where Labour got 34 percent of the vote and a whopping 63 percent of the seats, and where the new rightist Reform Party won 14 percent of the vote and got only 5 seats. Those were the rules ahead of the game, and they were the rules everyone had agreed to. There is one reason and one reason only why this kind of conciliatory exchange cannot happen any time soon in America, and that is Donald J. Trump. With a mind warped by pathological and malignant narcissism, incapable of generosity or grace or fairness, Trump has dominated this country’s politics for almost a decade now. He has systematically corroded every democratic norm and institution: the rule of law, the process of elections, the integrity of the Supreme Court, the independence of the Justice Department, the peaceful nature of the transfer of power, and the reliability of our alliances around the world. And none of this damage has been done to advance any broad policy or meaningful agenda, but merely and solely to advance the narcissism and corruption of the president himself.”