In the days after the 2016 election, with the shock of Donald Trump’s victory still fresh, Barack Obama spoke to The New Yorker’s David Remnick about his legacy and the country’s future. One topic of the conversation was the Democratic Party’s bench, or lack thereof. “Obama insisted that there were gifted Democratic politicians out there, but that many were new to the scene,” Remnick wrote. Obama mentioned Kamala Harris, the senator from California, who launched her Presidential candidacy this January with a rush of energy and attention. He mentioned Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whose own Presidential campaign has surged lately, thanks in part to a well-deployed use of Norwegian. And he mentioned Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado, who quietly entered the Presidential race last month, and who sits at between zero and one per cent in the polls going into the first Democratic debates this week.

On Tuesday, Bennet walked into a town house on Capitol Hill, removed his blue blazer, and sat down at a glass dining table to talk. He’d just come from a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is a member. Before that, he’d been at debate prep. Bennet will be one of twenty Democrats participating in the first Party-sanctioned primary debates, in Miami. With so many candidates in the race, the Party split the event into two nights, with ten candidates onstage on Wednesday and ten on Thursday. Still, it will be a challenge for Bennet and other candidates to get noticed. “We’re going to be up there for two hours, and probably, if you’re lucky, you’re going to get six or seven minutes,” he said. “This is an exercise in thinking about what you want to say in suboptimal conditions.”

It’s tough to get excited for a ten-person debate. The general atmosphere going into them is one of trepidation alternating with bemusement. The National Institute for Civil Discourse put out a press release on Wednesday that called on the candidates to keep it clean. BuzzFeed published a quiz that challenges readers to name every Democrat in the race. Substantive hashing out of policy and political contrasts isn’t likely to be on offer. But valuable air time is, so the candidates have been practicing. Kirsten Gillibrand let a Times reporter into a mock debate that she held, in which aides played her various rivals. Joe Biden has been huddling with top aides. Cory Booker has been doing pushups. Over the past couple of weeks, Bennet held a few practice sessions, in Washington, in a local middle-school auditorium that his staff had commandeered.

In 2007, writing for The New Yorker about Bennet’s time as the superintendent of the Denver public-school system, Katherine Boo described him as having “a low, gravelly voice that carries without volume and gives a deadpan, cheerful air to his admonitions.” As we talked, he folded and unfolded a red tie, which he’d presumably worn during his Intelligence Committee meeting, on the table before him. There was a lot he wanted to say. Bennet is confident in his ability to hold the attention of living rooms and barbecues in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he is hardly snappy, and he has a tendency to grant himself a senator’s prerogative to make an additional point. “These guys”—he gestured to the aides who had accompanied him to the interview—“will tell you that it’s a weakness of mine,” he said. “I never answer anything in less than a minute, unless it’s a one-word answer, in which case I can get it done in a second.”

On Thursday, when it’s his turn onstage, Bennet will be trying both to introduce himself to voters and to compress his platform into a few words. Bennet’s two big campaign planks—separate, sweeping electoral- and climate-change plans—can be difficult to fit into one-minute answers and thirty-second rebuttals. “Rather than have a long discussion about the Green New Deal,” he told me, “I think what I’m going to be focussed on is, This is my plan. It’s a comprehensive climate plan.” But Bennet’s climate position is complicated. He’s not an outright enemy of the fossil-fuel industry, but his plan is ambitious and has an eye on building a coalition of support—bringing in conservationist and agricultural interests—to increase its chance at passage. I asked him what he’d do if, at the debate, the moderators simply asked people to raise their hands if they support the Green New Deal. “You’re going to have to either raise your hand or not raise your hand,” he said, admitting that it had come up in prep. “And, if you feel strongly enough about it, you’re going to have to find some other opportunity to explain why you did it.”

Bennet’s campaign is premised, in part, on reaching people with a more moderate or modulated message than what much of the rest of the field is offering in 2020. FiveThirtyEight recently pointed out that, like his fellow-candidate Amy Klobuchar, Bennet has a more conservative voting record in the Senate than most of his Democratic colleagues. Part of Bennet and Klobuchar’s trouble is that Joe Biden has so far attracted most of the middle-of-the-road attention. But much of the rest of the field has embraced the idea that the Party has changed, or needs to change, in ways unforeseen when Obama mentioned Bennet three years ago. Harris, the other senator that Obama noted, has adjusted her stance and embraced newly popular ideas like Medicare for All, which Bennet considers to be a “fatal” position for a Democrat in a general election. I asked Bennet who he imagined would be watching on Thursday night, when he’ll be on. “It’s a bigger audience than watch cable at night, traditionally,” he said. “And it’s a bigger audience than are engaging with their politicians on Twitter, probably. So it’s the opportunity to be able to have a first impression with people who don’t spend all their time thinking about politics.”

Judith Krantz always wanted to write fiction, but it was not until she was approaching fifty, in the late nineteen-seventies, that her husband, Steve, persuaded her to finally attempt a novel. Her career up until that point had been in women’s magazines; she had been an accessories editor at Good Housekeeping and then a writer at Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, and she was an avid connoisseur of clothes. So when she turned, with trepidation, to fiction, she wrote what she knew. Her first novel, “Scruples,” published in 1978, is a fashion-retail version of a Cinderella story, set in nineteen-sixties L.A. It centers on Billy Orsini (born Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop), a young striver who moves to New York, where she takes secretarial work at Ikehorn Enterprises, a global conglomerate, and begins sleeping with the C.E.O., Ellis Ikehorn. They marry, and she takes to Ellis’s lavish life style with gusto—appearing at events and on best-dressed lists, and wearing a pair of eleven-karat Harry Winston diamond earrings at all times of day, “heedless of convention.” Then Ellis suffers a stroke, and the couple move to Bel Air for the mild weather. When Ellis dies, Billy finds herself a rich young widow with money and ambition to burn. So she decides to do what any clotheshorse dreams of: she opens a luxury boutique, called Scruples, on Rodeo Drive, and becomes the queen of Los Angeles fashion.

The rest of the plot of “Scruples” is schlocky, steamy “Dynasty”-era romance fare: hearts get broken, tongues get intertwined, gossip gets spread around. Much of the book reads today as deeply out of date; the phrases “divine wop” and “fag bullshit” are tossed off within the first ten pages. But, as an account of nascent eighties decadence the novel remains one of the most enjoyable texts I’ve ever read. At the store—which was modelled on the über-successful Giorgio Beverly Hills—Billy hires a smooth salesman named Spider Elliot, a blond lothario who sleeps with his customers as often as he dresses them. On Spider’s recommendation, she installs a pub and a backgammon table in the store, a boys’ club inside the girls’ club where shoppers’ husbands can drink and dally while their wives swipe their credit cards. And oh, the clothes! “Scruples” contains so many delicious descriptions of garments that you may find yourself longing to pet its pages. Fabrics are not just brown; they are “future-wordly tones of melting taupe, fawn, biscuit, and greige.” A woman doesn’t just walk into a party; she enters “with the glitter of a matador, encased in a vintage, shocking pink-and-black satin Schiaparelli, thickly encrusted with gold braid.” Of Billy’s jet-setting years with Ellis in Paris, Krantz writes:

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Krantz, who died over the weekend, at the age of ninety-one, developed her taste for fashion early. Born in 1928 as Judith Bluma-Gittel Tarcher, she was the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in advertising, and sent Krantz and her two siblings to an exclusive private school on the Upper East Side. But Krantz’s mother, a lawyer for Legal Aid who was always dressed to the nines, did not want Judith and her siblings to go soft in their life of privilege. So she made them “wear cheap clothes to their fancy school,” as Judith Shulevitz wrote, in a New Yorker piece on Krantz from 2000—“an injustice that guaranteed Judy’s commitment to the art of self-presentation.” As an adult, Krantz followed trends the way that some people follow stock tickers, and in her later years (after writing novels, including a “Scruples” sequel, had made her wildly wealthy) she obsessively collected Chanel and Hermes. In an essay for Vogue that she wrote at the age of seventy-three, Krantz looked back on her eventful life in apparel, sounding a lot like Billy Orsini: “I’ve sported bare legs with heels, the cinched-waist mid-calf skirt, the trapeze, the chemise, the chiffon blouse without a bra, the Mary Quant miniskirt, the YSL Smoking, the total Courrèges white-boot look, the bell-bottom trousers with the po’ boy sweater, the power suit, and the tie-dyed Zandra Rhodes evening pajamas.”

“Scruples” offers the fashion-minded reader not only immense pleasures but also some legitimate advice. If Krantz had one exceptional skill, it was knowing how to walk into a store and, with laser focus, find the item that would look sensational. Shopping, “Scruples” argues, is all about self-knowledge. As Spider Elliot tells one of his clients at the store, you have to abandon the idea that you will look great in everything and find what works just for you. “Ask yourself,” he says of trying on clothes, “am I still there or have I vanished? Think thin, think soft, think simple, think easy, with the emphasis on your eyes and your skin. That way you won’t ever get lost.”

On Monday, after reports that hundreds of children were being held in horrific conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, the federal government announced that most of the children were being transferred to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Then, on Tuesday, the government partially reversed course, saying that approximately a hundred of the children had been returned to the Border Patrol facility, and that the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, would step down in the coming weeks. There are still hundreds of other children in Border Patrol facilities across Texas. Many of them have been separated from family members, and some of them have been held there for weeks. In response to their plight, Democrats in Congress are urgently trying to pass a four-and-a-half-billion-dollar border-aid package. But some progressives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, oppose the bill, saying there are not enough measures to prevent the Trump Administration from using the money for immigration enforcement.

To discuss the crisis over children in Border Patrol custody, I spoke by phone with Jonathan Ryan, the C.E.O. and president of RAICES, a Texas-based nonprofit that provides legal counsel to immigrants. Shortly after we spoke, Sanders’s resignation and the reversal at the Clint facility were announced, so I called Ryan back to ask several more questions. During our conversations, which have been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the most important problems facing detained children, why Trump’s policies are less of an aberration than we might think, and how solutions might be found outside Congress.

What do you know about the places that the children in the Clint facility were moved to?

I have no idea where they were moved to. All we know is what was reported—that they went to Health and Human Services. Where they could be in that system is anybody’s guess at this point.

What is the larger meaning of moving them to H.H.S.?

When anybody comes to the border, either presenting themselves at a port of entry or crossing land or water, they are apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol. And the Flores Settlement of 1997 requires that the Border Patrol, within forty-eight hours of apprehension, determines whether an individual in its care is an unaccompanied child. Once Border Patrol makes that determination, it has seventy-two hours under the Flores Settlement to transfer that child to H.H.S. That is one of the crucial laws in Flores. It is ubiquitously the case that children who are in H.H.S. custody arrived from the Border Patrol. There are cases of children who were apprehended internally; that certainly occurs, but it is a very small number of kids.

But that is pretty much the process. The Border Patrol is mandated under the law to get children who are apprehended to H.H.S. custody as quickly as possible, because Flores requires that children be in licensed childcare facilities, and Border Patrol facilities are not, and neither are ICE detention centers. The problem here was first the deplorable conditions at the Clint facility, which are indicative of the conditions that we hear about in all border facilities, and second the length of time that these children languished in Border Patrol custody rather than being swiftly transferred into H.H.S. custody.

What is currently the most urgent matter regarding detained children?

I think one, given the deaths of children and deplorable conditions that are being found out, children have to be out of Border Patrol custody, or, if possible, never in Border Patrol custody to begin with. Clearly, they are incapable of providing suitable conditions at any time for any children. And the other most important thing is that, conditions aside, children have to have access to critical life-saving services, such as representation. You could put them in the Ritz-Carlton, but we are still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per child in an effort to send them back to the country that they fled.

The focus on conditions is important. I don’t want to discount it. But to solely focus on conditions is to neglect the fact that these are not children in Child Protective Services custody. In that case, the child’s parent is the subject of a judicial proceeding. In this case, the child is the defendant in a case where they are fighting for their lives. And no matter how fancy the cell is that they are held in, that is an inescapable reality, and they need protection from that, too.

What is your organization doing on the ground right now?

RAICES operates at almost every point of injustice in our immigration system. We work inside the so-called family-detention centers. We are one of the largest legal-service providers to unaccompanied children within H.H.S. detention centers. We work with local communities across the state of Texas that have been living a waking nightmare over the past week as a result of the threats of raids. We work with people who have been detained after they get out at the San Antonio bus station—our staff and volunteers work with hundreds of women and children per week, getting them out of detention and moving forward to be with their families. We pay bonds for people in immigration detention. Since last summer, we have spent more than four million dollars in immigration bonds. We have been continuing to assist the survivors of the zero-tolerance family-separation policy of last summer to get legal representation today, when they have been released and are living in different parts of the country. We are the largest immigration-law office in the state of Texas. We are on the front lines of every place we can get.

One thing that is notable is that one area where lawyers are specifically not allowed, nor are journalists, is inside the Border Patrol facilities. And that is where those children were found in Clint, Texas. That’s where these underpass and tent cages and cities are. And that is the one place where they don’t let lawyers. [Lawyers who spoke to the press about the conditions in Clint had entered the facility to monitor adherence to the Flores agreement, as part of an ongoing court case.]

How much evidence do you have that some of the worst things we are seeing are intentional, due to either a desire for deterrence or cruelty? Or is this more about the system being overwhelmed?

I have been hearing stories about the hielera, or ice box. This is what people call cold cells with concrete floors, or the mobile-mini [detention sites] that are littered around the hinterlands of south and central Texas. I have been hearing clients talking to me about these since I started doing this work, in 2003. And I spoke with young African men in their twenties, ten years ago. I have spoken with young Central-American children this year. And across geography, across age, across language, I have heard consistent stories about mistreatment and abuse inside of Customs and Border Protection custody. You hear about the refrigerated boxes people get shoved in. You hear about the separations of people from their children. You hear about manhandlings and rough treatment, unnecessary body-checking, shoving, pushing, hitting. You hear about cruel and abusive language: “Welcome to hell”; “If you think this is bad, wait until what you have in store for you next”; “You have no rights”; “If you ask for asylum, we will keep you here forever.”

And you cannot hear about this again and again and again, over years, and think it is an aberration from training. No, this is the training that the officers are receiving. And it has not changed in nature. We have seen this evil for many years, but it has increased dramatically in scale because of the explosion of funding over the past ten, fifteen years. It has increased in efficiency because of the collusion between the government and Big Tech, who are the backbone of ICE and Border Patrol, making their sinister acts more efficient. And it has increased in severity because we have a Commander-in-Chief who is telegraphing to all of these officers from the top down that he wants to see the cruelty, that he wants them to make people’s head hit the top of the car door.

What did you mean about Big Tech?

A.W.S. [Amazon Web Services], Salesforce, Palantir, Dell, Microsoft—this is how ICE operates, through services and products from all of these big tech companies. Hewlett Packard operates the network-operating center for ICE.

You have alluded to this, but should we think about what has gone on in the past couple of years as a break from past norms?

In terms of mistreatment, politically speaking, there is no good guy in this debate. Immigrants and their rights have been forsaken by both parties. And the truth is that Mr. Trump could not be doing what he is doing now without the infrastructure that was laid down by previous Presidents of both parties.

There has been a debate among Democrats in Congress about aid for the crisis at the border, with some in the party fearing that it will only be used to help the Trump Administration carry out its agenda, and that any requirements placed on the Administration will be ignored. Where do you come down in this debate?

I don’t gamble at the political table, but I can comment as an immigrant. RAICES has been doing this work for over thirty years. I was born in Canada. My folks were Irish immigrants. I have been doing this work for fifteen years. We in the immigrant community have been consistently disappointed by both political parties. I don’t have great expectations that politicians are going to resolve this, and my expectations in the current situation are low. We don’t have a lot of heroes.

O.K., but—

I know where you are trying to go. But what I would say is that we have the President we have. We have the Senate that we have. We have the Congress we have. And I think it is pretty apparent the way things are going to roll out here.

O.K., but step away from specific parties or specific bills. There is a debate about whether Congress should give more aid to facilities at the border, with some people saying it is really needed, and other people saying that the Administration will use it to carry out its agenda and won’t follow any conditions placed on this aid. I am curious how you think about that dilemma. It seems like a complicated one.

It is only complicated if you accept the premise that the only choice should be abdicating our responsibility to provide essential life-saving services, and creating a penal system that punishes vulnerable refugees for asking for asylum. We are being presented with a false choice.

What is the choice?

It is either you withhold funds from children who desperately need them, or you provide funds that will be used to create more cages, more concentration camps, more deaths of children at the border. The fact that you have to accept both in order to get the care to the people who need it is simply a false choice.

You are the person who just said that we have the President we have and the Senate we have. It is a false choice, but that doesn’t make it any easier if you are a representative in Congress who cares about kids and is faced with the President we have.

Well, this is where the responsibility falls back on we the people. We have seen the American people up in arms and demonstrating and filling parks and streets and sidewalks demonstrating against family separation. What we have now are children dying in these cages. We need to have that mobilization of people against this that pushes lawmakers of both parties to provide the funding to the children without creating more systems of oppression and torture and death. It absolutely needs to be demanded full-throatedly and clearly by the people.

[After the announcement that children were being returned to the Border Patrol facility in Clint, I spoke to Ryan again.]

Can you understand why they would move kids back to Clint?

It’s incomprehensible, given the heightened attention on this issue alone. But it’s despicable, considering the treatment the kids underwent in that facility, that any child is being allowed to be in there at all.

Is there some sort of legal remedy, given that they are supposed to be transferred to H.H.S.?

They are in violation of the Flores settlement, and so the very people who went to monitor the Clint facility as part of the Flores team hold the keys to enforcement of that agreement.

Again, what’s insulting on top of being injurious is that all of this is behavior by the government when it knows people are watching. They knew the inspectors were coming to Clint. They know that the world is watching, and yet they do this anyway. Just imagine what happens in the dark, and out of the view of the public. That’s why we have to have lawyers there; that’s why reporters have to talk about this. If not, you only have to allow your imagination to run wild to envision what could happen and what, in fact, is happening.

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For Bette Midler, the early nineteen-eighties was a period of searching. Her début studio album, “The Divine Miss M,” from 1972, had catapulted her from cult lounge singer to national star, and the record’s success had led to film projects, such as the starring role, as a reckless rock star, in “The Rose” (1979), which earned Midler an Oscar nomination and spawned a hit single. But her follow-up film, the comedy “Jinxed!” (1982), famously flopped. She wrote a memoir, “A View From a Broad,” which was published in 1980 and well received, but her show-biz career was at an impasse. “I was waiting for something to happen, for something to come my way,” Midler told me recently by phone. One day, daydreaming at her home in Los Angeles, she came up with an idea for a children’s book: the origin story of a precocious baby, a tiny diva in the making, who combats self-doubt and learns to step into the limelight with the help of three heavily maquillaged fairy godmothers. Midler shared the idea with her close friend Jerry Blatt, a composer and lyricist for “Sesame Street,” who had co-written Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue.” “In show-business parlance, he thought it had ‘legs,’ ” Midler told me.

“The Saga of Baby Divine” was published in 1983 and became a New York Times best-seller. Midler went on a multicity book tour, sporting special hats that she commissioned to celebrate her new life as “an authoress.” (Her favorite was in the shape of a vintage typewriter, with keys that actually moved.) The story, written in a doggerel stuffed with show-biz references (Darryl F. Zanuck! The Folies-Bergère! Giselle!), begins with an uptight suburban couple named the Divines, who welcome a baby daughter into the world just as a comet enters the sky. They are hoping for a “Proper, Presentable Daughter”; “nothing too Madcap or Garish or Wacky” is allowed in their sleepy neighborhood. But, much to the couple’s consternation, their baby arrives on this earth wearing high heels, and within moments of being born begins crowing the word “MORE!” The book’s cartoon illustrations, by the Pop-Surrealist artist Todd Schorr, depict Baby Divine with the guileless face of a Kewpie doll and the sultry mien of a lounge singer, wearing a jaunty floral diaper and with a giant flower decorating her curlicues of orange hair. Not to be outdone by her infant avatar, Midler appeared on the book’s back cover in a matching outfit, though with a Hawaiian-printed bikini in lieu of the diaper.

Midler told me that she considers “Baby Divine” to be autobiography. Growing up in Honolulu, Hawaii, she and her siblings were the only Jewish kids in her neighborhood; her parents were, as she put it, “as square as square could be.” “I always felt a little bit odd, because I was always listening to music and singing out loud,” she said. “I remember standing in the shower, singing at the top of my lungs, and people used to gather outside my apartment and listen to me sing. Because they were so struck that anyone was so loud.” She went on, “I felt that I was this Technicolor child in a black-and-white world. When I was finally liberated, when I finally came to New York and managed to get on the stage, with whatever it was that I had, I had finally gotten to Oz.”

The only people who understand Baby Divine are a trio of “Irrepressible Dames”: Lily, Tillie, and Joyce, who live together in a cramped boarding house filled with peacock feathers and oversized plants, in a section of town with a “Scurrilous Reputation.” (One of the book’s many quirks is a seemingly random capitalizations of words.) When they look out their window on the night of the baby’s arrival, the women see the sky over the Divine home “lit up like a Giant Marquee.” They caravan to the house and ring the front bell, elbowing past the Divines to gather beside the child’s cradle. Each woman bears a fabulous gift: Tillie her favorite feather boa, Joyce a “decrepit false nose,” and Lily a “Flutter of Rainbow and Dreams.” The women take their leave, but Baby Divine wiggles out of her cradle and goes searching for them. She rides on the back of a bird, and encounters a flame-eyed monster who calls himself Anxiety, but before he can prey upon her the three guardians swoop to the rescue. They encourage her to laugh and cry, and to dance and sing (the book includes two pieces of sheet music, one of them for a song called “More”), and teach her to tell the difference between “what’s Important and what / Is only a Crockful of Hooey.” By the time Baby Divine returns home, to newly appreciative parents, at the book’s end, it’s with the knowledge that her life will one day be fabulously lush and large.

I first read “The Saga of Baby Divine” in the stacks of a children’s library in Albuquerque, my home town, and I confess that I did not understand the half of it. Midler admits that the book is meant for older children, or maybe just for adults. Baby Divine herself sometimes struggles to apprehend the lessons of Lily, Tillie, and Joyce, as in this great extended passage in which Lily offers a taxonomy of laughter:

Even with my limited grasp of these rambunctious rhymes, the text of “Baby Divine” fascinated me. The story became imprinted in the still, small part of me who also longed for more, who felt like the Baby who did not quite fit in with my dusty desert town. I didn’t realize it then, but Midler’s myth, like so much of her music, was unapologetically about a struggle to belong. Lily, Tillie, and Joyce are ostensibly women, but Schorr, for his part, drew them a bit like drag queens, garishly glamorous exiles who can turn any scrap of errant cloth into a fashion moment, and whose ultimate gift to their young charge is the power of pageantry. They are also the characters in a topsy-turvy nativity story, the Three Wise Women to Midler’s anointed child. Whether or not you find it inspiring or galling to see a woman cast herself as a Tinseltown Messiah depends on what you find sacred.

Midler, who is seventy-three, recently starred in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway, and will appear next in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix drama “The Politician” and in Julie Taymor’s Gloria Steinem bio-pic, as the pugnacious feminist lawyer Bella Abzug. In her spare time, she has been waging a Twitter battle against Donald Trump, who called her a “washed up psycho” on the platform earlier this month. (She responded with a Photoshopped still from the film “Hocus Pocus” that shows herself, Kathy Griffin, and Stormy Daniels as witches grouped around the President.) Midler’s daughter, Sophie, liked reading “The Saga of Baby Divine” as a child, but she’s grown now, and Midler keeps copies of the book, which is out of print, on a high shelf in her office. She said that before I called she hadn’t thought much about Baby Divine in a long time; “MORE!,” as a life style, leaves little room for lingering in the past. “It’s a funny thing. Certain kinds of people do what they do—they look at it, they’re proud of it—and then they move right on,” Midler told me. “ ‘Thank u, next,’ as Ariana Grande likes to say.”

One of the things I have feared most since the night of the 2016 election is the inevitable hardening of my own heart—and what such hardening might lead to, especially if it were experienced by many other people as well. Specifically, I feared that the Trump era would bring a surfeit of bad news, and that I would compartmentalize this bad news in order to remain functional, and that this attempt to remain functional would itself be so demoralizing that it would contribute to the despair and distraction that allowed all this bad news to occur.

When I imagined specifics, back in November, 2016, I pictured something like last week—or part of it. I imagined that undocumented families would be openly and cruelly persecuted in America, and that there would be plans of mass raids and internment, and that as this was happening I would not be rioting in the street as I ought to but depressively checking things off my Google Calendar to-do list and probably writing a blog post about a meme. What I didn’t imagine, though—and what actually occurred last week—is that a respected and well-known writer would accuse the President of raping her, and that I would be so sad and numb, after years of writing about Trump’s many accusers, after watching Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed to the Supreme Court in the face of credible sexual-assault allegations, that I would not even have the courage to read the story for days.

E. Jean Carroll, now seventy-five years old, is a longtime advice columnist for Elle. Her approach to life is distinctive: brisk, stylish, tough, compassionate. Her columns provided an early and crucial model for me—when I was little and waist-deep in the mistake of trying to understand life through women’s glossies—of never giving my personal problems more weight than was absolutely necessary. The essay that she published last week, in New York, titled “My List of Hideous Men”—it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book—performs the tremendous and awful feat of bringing her sharp-edged breeziness to bear on a story about being raped. Carroll’s “hideosity bar is high,” she writes. A boy who shoved a stick or rock up her genitals when she was a girl doesn’t make the list. Hunter S. Thompson, slicing her pants off with a knife in a hot tub, doesn’t make it either, because, she writes, “to me there is a big difference between an ‘adventure’ and an ‘attack.’ ”

Carroll goes on to detail multiple sexual assaults: by a college suitor, by a boss who chased her down a hotel hallway, by the former CBS president and C.E.O. Les Moonves. (Moonves denies the allegation.) “By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap?” she writes. “Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything.” Plus, she adds, she’s a born cheerleader: she was a cheerleader in grade school, in high school, and was even the winner of a competition called Miss Cheerleader U.S.A. For years, in her advice columns, she cheered for each correspondent to “pick herself up and go on.”

But there are two men, she writes, whom she wishes she’d spoken about sooner. One is a camp director who repeatedly molested her when she was twelve. The other is Donald Trump. The incident happened in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, she writes. She and Trump ran into each other at Bergdorf Goodman; Trump convinced her to help him shop for a present in the lingerie department; Carroll—“and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity,” she states—went into the fitting room with him; Trump shoved her against the wall, unzipped his pants, and forced his penis inside her. Eventually, Carroll fought him off and ran away. She still carries around the shrapnel of this encounter, myriad pointed details lodged in her mind—such as the fact that, at the beginning of the struggle, she was so shocked that she was laughing. There is a limit, for everyone, to the uses of compartmentalization. Whether it’s “my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel ‘the sap rising,’ as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say,” Carroll writes, closing her essay. “But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”

A lot of hearts seem to have hardened not just in response to Carroll’s story but in the long lead-up to it. When the piece appeared online, there was an immediate unspoken sense, I thought—although it’s certainly possible that I’m projecting—that it would tell us only what we already knew. Trump accused himself of sexual assault, on tape, in 2005, while filming “Access Hollywood,” and we found out about it just before the election, and, because any man who boasts about grabbing women by the pussy is likely to have done so and worse, repeatedly and with no compunction, it’s all been extremely, deadeningly predictable from there. The White House said in a statement that Carroll’s story was “false and unrealistic” and was “created simply to make the President look bad.” Trump later stated that Carroll was just trying to sell books, and claimed that he had never met her, despite New York running a photo of the two of them talking at a party. “It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations,” he said. On Monday, in an interview with The Hill, Trump, deploying a blatant grotesquerie that was surely intended to play to his base, said, “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.”

But a public figure accusing the President of rape is news. Even though Carroll is at least the twenty-second woman to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct, she is only the second to accuse him of rape. (The first was Ivana Trump, who later downplayed her story.) Though Carroll received the pride of place at New York that she deserved, appearing on the cover of the magazine, her story did not make the front page of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, or the Chicago Tribune. The New York Post deleted a story about Carroll’s allegations on Friday. The Times was slow to feature the story online and didn’t run its piece in print until Sunday. Weekend talk shows mostly ignored the topic; on Sunday, Brian Stelter, on CNN, discussed the lack of attention the story was getting, citing the possibility—the reality—of media fatigue. There have been so many accusations against Trump that none has been able to receive the undivided attention that it ought to, Stelter suggested. And the news cycle itself is so quick-moving and chaotic that every important story, regardless of its subject, is metabolized too fast.

There are other explanations, too, though none of them are particularly satisfactory. Newspapers tend to prioritize stories that they’ve broken in house. There are also good journalistic reasons for seeking independent confirmation of a story before giving it prominence. But, on Monday, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, acknowledged that the paper had “underplayed the article.” Though Carroll’s account was vetted by New York—two friends confirmed that she told them the story contemporaneously with the event—it was a first-person account rather than an investigative report. And it gets harder to tell this story over and over and over, as a lesson we learned in 2016 only becomes clearer: there are many people in this country, including, apparently, the majority of Republicans who hold national office, who don’t believe that rape is that big of a deal. As we saw during the Kavanaugh hearings, a portion of those people may grow to like a man better after he is accused of sexual assault. In her essay for New York, Carroll acknowledges the risk that she might make Trump more popular by telling the story of how he raped her. In these cases, the accuser is not so much disbelieved as conscripted into a narrative of women attempting to victimize men by arousing public sympathy. The powerful solidify their power by pretending that they have been threatened and attacked. This dynamic is central to both fascism and abuse.

It has felt impossible, in the Trump era, to hope even for a second that our governing systems will operate on any standard of morality. What we have instead is a standard of consistency. If the President had ever convincingly espoused ideas of respect for people who are not like him, or of equal rights for women, it’s possible that he would be held accountable for his actions. Instead, he promised mass campaigns of cruelty against undocumented immigrants, and he is delivering. He said that he grabbed women by the pussy, and many women—twenty-two, so far—explained that, yes, he did that, or something like it, to them. Carroll’s essay—exceptional, devastating, decades in the making—has made me consider how hard it is to understand right away that you’ve been exhausted into submission, especially when submission and endurance feel inextricable. It’s reminded me of how high I’ve let my own hideosity bar get lately, and also of the fact that no one can lower it again but me.

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