“Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted – a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage – and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.”
