Volume 6, Issue 48: Zero Dark Thirty
Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.
SubscribedIt is a longstanding tradition—one, that goodness, has now gone on for more than 10 years—that, in an even-numbered election year, I write an electoral endorsement post. Here’s 2016, and here’s 2018, and here’s 2020, here’s 2022 and here’s 2024 Part One and 2024 Part Two. Here is this year’s.
Is this going to end?
This is a different question than the one I used to ask. I used to ask when is this going to end? For most of the last decade, I have generally assumed that the era of grift, vice, stupidity and cruelty that was ushered in when he came down that escalator in 2015 would be coming to an end at some point. There were several false dawns. 2016 would have been a way to end it before it really started; Covid felt like the death knell; 2020 was supposed to be the official pivot; January 6 was assuredly the proverbial final nail, the time when all his madness culminated in something truly terrifying and, one had to think, an event so catastrophic and disgusting that there couldn’t possibly any coming back from it. Each one of those times, I thought, well, that’s it: We could all get back to trying to fix all that he had broken, to attempt to solve the problems he’d exploited for his own gain and to make sure nothing like him could ever happen again. Maybe we would be successful and maybe we wouldn’t, but we would at least be able to move on from him and isolate his “movement,” such as it was, as something to excise from the public consciousness. In retrospect, this was helplessly naive and stupid, but I did geniunely believe it. I am not the only one who did.
It was 2024 when I could no longer kid myself, that the question shifted from “When will this end?” to “Will this end?”
My oldest son William was three years old when he came down that escalator; my youngest son Wynn was three days away from his first birthday. William is now about to get his drivers permit, and Wynn is as tall as his mother. This has been their entire world. They don’t know a world where he isn’t the main character of everything, to everyone, everywhere. They have seen cruelty and coarseness and racism and incompetence and stupidity and monstrousness and tragedy in the last 11 years that I could have never imagined for them. They have seen what has been wrought seep into their lives everywhere they look, from the way their classmates treat each other to the way all the parents fight with each other to the way strangers talk to each other. They see it on their phones, they see it at school, they see it on television, they see it in their home and their friends’ homes, they see it at the ballpark, they inhale it they breathe it they live it—it’s everywhere they might possibly go. In the beginning, I thought I could just mute the television when he was speaking and maybe the four years would pass without them really noticing, that this would just be some weird blip in American history everyone tried to pretend never happened. But you cannot mute the world for a decade.
This makes me angry. I should be upfront about this. I am angry that my children, and so many other children, that basically anyone under the age of, oh, 21, I am angry that this is all they have known. I want to put my arm around all of them and let them know the world is, in fact, better than this. That is not aspirational thinking, just something I’m telling myself to feel better. It is better than this. I have seen it. For most of my life, the first 40 years of it, it was. The world was not perfect—it was extremely far from perfect. But it was better than this. I do not disagree that his emergence was—and is—an indictment of us, our country, our inherent myopia, our institutional racism, a certain aspect of the American consciousness that is mean and dark and nasty and always has been. Perhaps there is some value in no longer being able to lie to ourselves and pretend otherwise. But that value is far outweighed by how much he has destroyed, and how much he has made us, collectively, all of us, forget the goodness that was here, what we were capable of, what we could do, when we were at our best. The notion of even believing that this could be a good country has become in many circles embarrassing, simple-minded or even a sign of some sort of complicity, like if you believe in America, you’re somehow responsible for this. It has made believing in a better world feel stupid.
But it’s not stupid, and it’s not embarrassing, and it’s not complicit, because I’ve seen it. And it makes me angry that my kids, on the whole, haven’t.
I showed them this video the other day. I just wanted them to know there was a time when the President, the loudest voice on the planet, talked like this.
They didn’t care, because they’re 14 and 12 and I’m their dad, of course they don’t care. But I want them to someday remember that their dad cared, and that he wanted to make sure that, somewhere down deep, it was important that they care too. Because everything that’s going to have to get fixed, they’re going to have to be a part of it.
But it has to end first.
And Tuesday is a chance to start to end it.
The last two years have been worse than I thought they’d be—and I thought they would be bad—but not as bad as they could have been. The president and his cronies (and those are the only people left) were more aggressive than even those the most terrified they would be, but they’ve also been as incompetent and stupid as we thought they’d be too, and it’s possible that ends up being our saving grace. There is a world where someone with the total awesome power of the United States government—as Trump has had for the last two years—is cunning and efficient and smart, and slowly, but surely, everything we thought America was would drain and dribble away. Some of this has happened of course. We have lost any standing we had left in the international community in a way that is destructive to the world but arguably worse for ourselves; it has been two year of shooting ourselves in every appendage. We have lost good, valuable people, families have been torn apart, there are people who should be alive right now and are not—it has been awful.
But, if this ends someday, and I’m definitely still saying if, 2026 will be the year that it turned. This is the year it fell apart. It did so from the very beginning, starting with the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (whose parents are still trying to get answers out of the government), which led to the truly heroic resistance that the city of Minneapolis showed in response. This was the first real, sustained and unquestionably successful pushback the administration had received in his second term—they certainly didn’t get much from worlds of technology, finance and media—and it was a signal to the rest of the country that the country, at its core, had not fundamentally changed, that good people would fight back against injustice and oppression, that you were not crazy, what was happening was immoral and horrific and you had a foundational right, even obligation, to stand up against it. What Minneapolis did was show, in broad daylight, documented by every day citizens just trying to live their lives, what was happening, what they were doing … and Americans were appalled, because how could they not be? (Here is your reminder that the Vice President refused to apologize to the Pretti family for calling their son a “terrorist” and, in fact, when asked if he should apologize, snapped “for what?”) As usual, the administration’s response was incoherent, backing down in some places and doubling down in others, which had a dual effect: Their weakness was exposed while they still, because of the absurd, delusional media echo chamber in which they reside and the erratic, sundowning leader they all follow, kept making idiotic decisions that made them look even more incompetent and insane while consistently, and steadily, making life worse for more and more American citizens.
This lead to the insane tariffs and the profoundly misguided Iran war, both the sort of slam-head-on-desk decisions that could only come from the addled and the deranged. This worked to turn nearly everyone against them: Those who did so for moral reasons and those who did so for political reasons were joined by those who did so for household or financial reasons. It exposed them for what they were: Vacant, nihilist dipshits. It is now impossible not to see unless you are purposely trying not to look. (Which a third of the country has proven amazingly apt at doing.)
Which leads, again, to Tuesday.
This is a midterm election, which means it will be not be enough by itself to reverse the insane decision this country made to re-elect this madman in 2024. But if this is going to end someday, if, that has to start by curbing him now, right now, before he can cause more unfettered damage. There will be more bad things in the next two years even if this election goes against the president; as many have noted, if you corner a rabid raccoon in your garage, that you have have cornered a rabid raccoon in your garage is both the good news and the bad news. But putting control of the Senate and the House back in the hands of the opposition party does two massively important things:
It puts up an institutional blockade that will not stop him but will absolutely slow him down.
It is a massive public rebuke, a clear, obvious and overwhelming sign—to the nation, to the world, to him, to Republicans who have supported him out of self-interest, to every American citizen, to history—that this is not what we want, this is not who we are, that we want this overwith. That we want it to end.
This is why the “blue wave” that seems to be forming is so important. You can be skeptical of some of the Democratic candidates, for whatever reason you may be skeptical of them. You can focus just on your own state, whether it has a Senate race or not. You can argue what the direction of the Democratic party should or should not be. (Which will, in itself, affect the direction of the Republican party, which is an important factor in whether this is going to end for all of us, whether you are a Republican or not.) But right now, a huge wound has been gushing blood for the last two years, and if we don’t at least put some sort of tourniquet on it, we’re gonna bleed out. Control of Congress will slow him down for the next two years, and that’s important. But just as important, if not more so, is drawing the line in the sand right now: This has to end. We have to be something different.
My friend David Wallace-Wells wrote a terrific piece this week for The New York Times about how this really might be the start of the end of the epoch, and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker had a great one too.
But are they right?
The signs point to them being right. We have been waiting for the fever to break. This feels as close as we have gotten. But we have gotten close before.
I am a liberal, and I have voted for a Democratic candidate every Presidential election of my lifetime. I have voted for Republicans before: I actually voted for Michael Bloomberg for mayor twice. (Not the third time though.) I understand that you may not share my political beliefs, which is fine: You and I are entirely different human beings, it would be weird and even a little unnerving if we agreed on everything all the time. This does not mean we cannot connect with each other, it does not mean we are not far more alike than we are different. This is what makes us alive and human.
When it comes to this particular election, though, and the two most important things this election can do—stop him, and rebuke him in the clearest possible terms—there is really just one option for me to endorse: Vote Democratic. Up and down.
Here in Georgia, I voted for Jon Ossoff for Senate and Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor.
(I literally do one TikTok every two years. That’s this one.)
I do believe, still, that this will end. And then the real work will begin. It’s time to begin.
SENATE MAP PREDICTION
While I have you, and for the record. (And you will note from 2024 how bad I am at this.)
Good luck out there, everyone.
This newsletter is and will always remain free. Subscribe here.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.
Cody Campbell, Billionaire Rage Tweeter, The Athletic. This is really about billionaires.
Four Takeaways From a Conversation With Chaim Bloom, MLB.com. Wrote up my talk with him last week.
The First Illini Power Rankings of the Season, Illini Board. Yep, writing 4,000 words every month or so about a college basketball team again this year.
Who’s the Next Team To Break Through Like the Brewers? MLB.com. Get ready, Rays.
“The Dropout” Is a Nostalgia Piece For When We Liked Tech People, The Washington Post. I think this is probably my final think piece off You Can See Everything.
And here is your reminder that even if you don’t subscribe to The Washington Post, you can get all my pieces there for free by subscribing to the Fanfare With Will Leitch newsletter.The Horror Movie That Never Leaves Your Brain, The Washington Post. Several writers contributed to this, I did Poltergeist.
DC Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Clayface.
Cardinals Award Possibilities, MLB.com. I think JJ Wetherholt is gonna fall just short.
Your World Series Game Five Preview, MLB.com. Previewing games that already happened.
Your World Series Game Four Preview, MLB.com. Previewing games that already happened.
Your World Series Game Three Preview, MLB.com. Previewing games that already happened.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Possible Love,” “Wildwood” and “Fatherland.”
Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Tuesday’s shows. We’re off until games start again.
Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, the guys and I previewed the Florida game.
LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK
“The American Tragedy of Edgar Maddison Welch,” Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic. Great great piece about the guy who stormed that Washington DC pizza place a decade ago and how long ago that truly seems.
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!
Write me at:
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Helpless,” Sugar. Man did this show rule that week. Congrats to Sugar, and my friend David Barbe, for finishing their six-month tour back here in Athens.
Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!
Good luck out there this week. See you on the other side.
Best,
Will
© 2026 Will Leitch
Will Leitch, P.O. Box 48, Athens GA 30603