Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020?

In today’s newsletter, back to the future, and then:
•Academic freedom under fire
•Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fund-raising tactics
•Can a hedge fund pay for journalism?

Here we go again.On Wednesday, Donald Trump, while spending a day off from his criminal trial in Manhattan on the road in the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan, gave an interview to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was asked a question that, until Trump entered politics, never really needed to be asked in American public life: Win or lose, will you commit to accept the results of the 2024 election? “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” Trump told the newspaper. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” In other words: no.

P.S. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senatorwhose furious search for Communists in American society dominated the politics of the early nineteen-fifties, died on this day in 1957. AsLouis Menand has written, although McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.