Trump, the trigger: Michelle Goldberg speaks with victims of sexual assault and finds that their memories, and fears, have been relentlessly stirred up by the Trump campaign. “It’s as if Trump has shaken a psychic snow globe, and now flickers of half-remembered horror are floating through the atmosphere all around us,” Goldberg writes.
Rigging up “rigged”: For 16 years, the GOP has been building up this idea that national elections are “rigged” for Democratic candidates, Mark Joseph Stern writes. Now the party is trying to hide from the work it’s done.
It doesn’t work that way: Fixing an American presidential election by having people vote for a candidate twice would be prohibitively difficult, Richard L. Hasen writes. Other methods—hacking into computers, paying for or stealing absentee ballots—would likewise fail.
Next act: Barack Obama has begun to tell us what he might do after he leaves the presidency in 2017. One of his projects, Jim Newell writes, is a Democratic initiative that will fight state-level political battles—including campaigning against gerrymandering.
For fun: Some compound German words used to describe Donald Trump.
What Schlammschlacht,
Rebecca
