NYTM 2020-11-01

48 Pages·2020·9.9 MB·English

Whatever happens on Tuesday, the presidency of Donald Trump has transformed the G.O.P. By Elaina Plott

November 1, 2020

3
Copyright © 2020 The New York Times

Photograph by Erika Larsen/Redux, for The New York Times

November 1, 2020

7 Screenland Town Square By Mattathias Schwartz / 11 Talk Armstrong Williams By David Marchese / 14 The Ethicist An Adult Child Returns
By Kwame Anthony Appiah / 16 Diagnosis Throbbing Head and Vision Trouble By Lisa Sanders, M.D. / 18 Letter of Recommendation The ‘‘Purge’’ Films
By Blair McClendon / 20 Eat Shiro, a Ground-Chickpea Stew By Samin Nosrat

4 Contributors / 5 The Thread / 10 Poem / 14 Judge John Hodgman / 19 Tip / 40, 44, 46 Puzzles / 40 Puzzle Answers

Nicodemus Acosta, a Navy veteran,
was convicted in Kuwait for dealing
marijuana — a crime he did not
commit — and spent a year in jail
there. Page 28.

Behind the Cover Gail Bichler, design director: ‘‘Th is week’s cover story, by Elaina Plott, argues that over the past four years, the Republican Party
has become almost completely defi ned by its members’ loyalty to President Trump. At the center of the cover is the Republican Party’s elephant. Its trunk,
made up of headlines from Trump’s presidency, snakes outward to reveal the president’s profi le.’’ Cover illustration by Mike McQuade.

22 In His Image
By Elaina Plott / The Republican
Party is now Donald Trump’s party,
whether he wins or loses the
election. Its politicians, activists
and voters are still figuring out
what that means.

28 Left Behind
By Doug Bock Clark / Over the last
five years, at least 28 American
military contractors have been
imprisoned in Kuwait — some of
them on trumped-up drug charges,
and many after being physically
abused. Why has the government
done so little to help them?

34 Baseball’s Quiet Season
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips / Empty
stadiums, player protests and
Covid-19 outbreaks shook up the
sport. Maybe that’s a good thing.

4

Contributors

11.1.20

‘‘Left Behind,’’
Page 28

‘‘Baseball’s Quiet Season,’’
Page 34

Diagnosis,
Page 16

Screenland,
Page 7

‘‘In His Image,’’
Page 22

Doug Bock Clark

Rowan Ricardo
Phillips

Lisa Sanders, M.D.

Mattathias Schwartz

Dear Reader:
What Prompts
The Biggest Eye
Roll From You?

Lisa Sanders is an internist and associate
professor at the Yale School of Medicine in
New Haven, Conn. She has written the
Diagnosis column since 2002, and it was
recently developed into a Netflix series.

Elaina Plott is a national political reporter
for The New York Times, where she covers the
Republican Party and conservatism. Her
last article for the magazine was a profile of
Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s former attorney
general, who was permanently exiled from
Trump’s orbit for a seeming show of disloyalty.
Her cover story for this issue explores the degree
to which Trump’s takeover of the Republican
Party has been at once total and superficial.
‘‘The fact that the only guiding principle of today’s
G.O.P. is loyalty to Donald Trump has in many
ways been great for party unity,’’ Plott says.
‘‘The problem for the party is that Trump has had
no interest in forming a cogent ideological
vision to propel it in his absence. So when he’s
gone, whether that’s in 2021 or 2025, what’s
left of this institution?’’

Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose book,
‘‘The Last Whalers,’’ about a hunter- gatherer
tribe grappling with globalization, won
the Lowell Thomas Travel Book Silver Award.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of ‘‘Living
Weapon’’ and ‘‘The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey.’’
He won the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary
Sports Writing.

Mattathias Schwartz is a contributing writer
for the magazine who lives in Washington.
He previously wrote a profile of Attorney General
William P. Barr.

The magazine publishes the
results of a study conducted
online in March 2020
by The New York Times’s
research- and- analytics
department, refl ecting the
opinions of 2,250 subscribers
who chose to participate.

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Elaina Plott

5%
Did not answer

28%
No-fat diet

18%
Kombucha
15%
Crocs
11%
Slime

10%
Spinners
10%
Beanie Babies
3%
Rainbow Loom

5
Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri

‘When the
masks come off
and there
is more facial
hair, the
exploration
of ‘‘Why?’’ is
arguably
fundamental in
these times.’

The Thread

THE STORY,

ON INSTAGRAM

I love your
cover art lately!
@doubleoroos

comments, both good and bad. My young
son at onetime said that my hair was turn-
ing white but my mustache was going
green. Keep it.
Nicholas Paslawsky, Manasquan, N.J.

I wanted this piece to go on forever. I
thank Wesley Morris for his witty, lyrical
writing and intelligent commentary about
his world — our world — one we should all
be trying to understand together. When
the masks come off and there is more
facial hair, the exploration of ‘‘Why?’’ is
arguably fundamental in these times.
S Nesbitt, Muir Beach, Calif.

What an incredibly poignant piece of
writing. The several ties between his-
torical fi gures, family relatives and Mor-
ris’s own self are so intricately drawn
and woven together. You know a piece
is transcendent when you can so clearly
see your own life experience at the same
time. I feel a form of double duty, read-
ing the lines and between them, like the
spacing between the letters are a mirror
into my own dedication to long hair. I’m
sure there’s a deep and complex history
of long hair for Chinese men, though I
haven’t put into words my own unspoken
desire to maintain long hair. It may not
have the same political weightiness of
the mustache and of being Black, but it’s
an avenue nonetheless worth mining as
another facet of self-identifi cation.
Brandon Wang, Brooklyn, N.Y.

I’m an old white man. I think you carry the
mustache well. What I’m thinking, though,
is that nonwhite men are compelled to see
themselves through so many lenses — the
famous double consciousness — while
white men (especially straight white men)
are not. This lens-shifting strikes me as

Readers respond to the 10.18.20 issue.

RE: MY MUSTACHE, MY SELF
Wesley Morris wrote about growing a mus-
tache in quarantine, and how it led to a deep
consideration of his own Blackness.

Mr. Morris, your piece grabbed my mind
with a torrent of imagery, masculine rela-
tional dynamics, crafted storytelling,
deep honesty and exposure to aspects
of life that I have never felt, or perhaps
even known. I was drawn to learn more
of your many cultural references. But the
strength of your narrative captivated me
most. I could not stop reading. Thank you
for sharing so deeply of yourself.
John Havlicek, Th ousand Oaks, Calif.

Thank you for one of the best reading
experiences I have had in a long time.
Your writing is exquisite and enjoyable.
I wish I had discovered you when you
wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle.
On a personal note, I started to grow my
mustache on the day I arrived in Vietnam,
in June 1968. It is part of me, and I have
never considered shaving it off . I think
I would be afraid of what I looked like.
Beards and goatees have come and gone
over the years, but the mustache is who I
am . In my opinion, your mustache is who
you are, and I think you should continue
to wear it with pride.
Jim Cercone, San Francisco

I was pulled in as soon as I saw the word
‘‘mustache,’’ and enjoyed every word of
your article. My mundane reason for
growing a mustache at the age of 16 (it
took two years) was a snowball that hit
me in the lip and left me with fi ve stitch-
es. From there, I never looked back. I’m
65 now and have lived through endless

both exhausting and insightful. I’ve had
beards, long hair, short hair, mustaches
and never wondered what they meant —
which I can see is both an amazing priv-
ilege and a missed opportunity.
John, California

Wesley Morris is a great critic, in my
humble opinion. But this piece shows the
state of our society, especially our nar-
cissism and our national obsession with
identity distinctions, which has reached a
level of obsession in all aspects of life that
makes little sense to most of the world’s
inhabitants. On one level, we have here
a pleasant piece of entertainment and a
resonating truth about the mustache. On
another level, everyone is writing heart-
felt essays that a decade ago would have
been pieces in The Onion.
Daniel Morris, Massachusetts

Wesley, as with everything you write, this
had me racing to the bottom, and then sad
it was over. I often think about the vari-
ous modes through which women express
themselves via hair, and have considered
that facial hair is the equivalent for men.
Your exploration of the mustache through
the lens of being Black and gay illuminates
the semiotics of how we groom ourselves
so well. And I love the turtleneck.
Emily, Austin, Tex.

CORRECTION:
An interview on Sept. 27 about Ilhan Omar,
the Democratic congresswoman from Min-
nesota, referred incorrectly to her family’s
arrival in the United States in 1995. Th ey
came to the United States as refugees. Th ey
were not granted asylum status.

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