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The Best Cover -- Digby
https://digbysblog.net/2025/05/08/the-best-cover/The Atlantic wins the ASME 2025 Best Cover Award for our October 2024 issue.
Inspired by the visual language of old Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks, Justin Metz created this illustration—among the only covers without a headline or typography in our history.
For a deep dive into what brought us here, this piece from a while back by Zack Beauchamp at Vox is well worth reading.
Like I said… dark. But it’s best to know what we’re dealing with and as I’ve pointed out so many times, and as that cover above illustrates so perfectly, we are dealing with an authoritarian who is also a circus performer and a con man. I don’t know if that combination makes him better or worse than any other autocrat but it does make him different and, I think, weaker than those others. So much depends upon people loving his act. Will they love it so much if he falls off the high wire and goes splat or gets gobbled up by a hungry lion (he forgot to feed?) We’ll see.
For a deep dive into what brought us here, this piece from a while back by Zack Beauchamp at Vox is well worth reading.
The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?
One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.
That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.
Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.
Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.
. . .
One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.
That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.
Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.
Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.
. . .
Like I said… dark. But it’s best to know what we’re dealing with and as I’ve pointed out so many times, and as that cover above illustrates so perfectly, we are dealing with an authoritarian who is also a circus performer and a con man. I don’t know if that combination makes him better or worse than any other autocrat but it does make him different and, I think, weaker than those others. So much depends upon people loving his act. Will they love it so much if he falls off the high wire and goes splat or gets gobbled up by a hungry lion (he forgot to feed?) We’ll see.