I've told you both before that I viewed Trump's election as perhaps the most damaging thing to America since the Civil War. You both (not unreasonably) dismissed that claim as insane. It is if you look at it from the perspective that wars and terrorist attacks are far more deadly, but we've bounced back stronger for the most part from those events. It's not clear that the divisions that Trump's election prompted can be healed without a re-evaluation of our culture, which sure doesn't seem likely in the near future. A separate excerpt from French's article sums it up well:

"Last week the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan published one of the most important essays of the year. Called “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” Kagan persuasively argued that America was set for an electoral confrontation (especially if Trump runs again) that could lead to the “greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

He’s not wrong, and the reason he’s not wrong is hidden in an under-discussed paragraph deep in the essay. He understands what few people grasp—that American radicalism has now filtered down into the ranks of the “normal” folks, the solid citizens who are often the pillars of their communities. Here’s Kagan:

The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties."