How We Got Lost

One sentence from Elizabeth Strout explains what happened to America.

Elizabeth Strout shakes the world, hard, with one line of dialogue in her latest novel, The Things We Never Say. I’m not sure I wanted this shaking. Watch how perspective slips around through this single sentence, until the heart-stopping crash:

“When this lunatic was running for president the first time, your mother and I would watch their party’s debates, and one night he said about one of his competitors onstage with him—or maybe he said it afterward, I can’t remember—but at some point he said, ‘He looks like a girl,’ and what I remember, Rob, is that every time afterward—every time—I saw that other man I saw him as a girl.”

Is that it? That’s it, I think. That’s why the country is Trump’s, and why it brims with hate. Somehow, way back in the Republican primary debates, we were sentenced to live in his cranium, behind his eyes, and now we see as he does, we see with his contempt.