Winners & Losers: Mourning & Morning in America
Sam Osterhout
Welcome back to your weekly leaderboard of losers. I’m writing this on Sunday, June 15, after one of the most consequential weeks in — perhaps — decades. I know, I know. Every week feels like the most consequential in history, and every news cycle brings new horrors. But last week, I think, was different.
A horrifying feature of the Trump years is a simmering background noise of terribleness, constantly burbling through our lives, punctuated by blazing hot explosions, the debris of which we spend the following months sorting through (and that create their own internal, simmering, persistent heat).
Think: the explosion of the feds raiding Mar-a-Lago, and the resulting years-long fizzle. Big news! And then … what? Simmering.
But last week, the breaking news was real breaking news with real impacts on real people. The constant stream of videos of masked ICE agents (were they actually ICE? Did they have warrants? Could they even name the moms and kids and dads they were disappearing?) breaking into homes and shoving people into unmarked vans; the horses trampling protesters underfoot; the stormtroopers hosing down peaceful protesters with pepper spray. This isn’t a story about classified documents, or grift, or tariffs — all of which are destroying our Democracy with a thousand tiny cuts. This is something different.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/winners-and-losers-mourning-and-morning