JV Last writes about one of the most profoundly depressing aspects of this election — half the country’s willingness to reward Trump with another term despite his performance as the worst leader in a national crisis in memory. There’s a Churchill quote that goes something like this: The after effect from the extreme prostrations of war—even a successful war—is ennui. He was explaining that in democratic societies, wars begin with drums and parades, but ends with public disaffection.3 There might be a corollary to this rule concerning pandemics because it is pretty clear that COVID broke something deep in the American psyche. It’s why people went crazy for two years, screaming at strangers in the grocery store about masks. It’s why we have a mass economic delusion in which people aren’t able to accurately perceive the state of the economy. It’s why we got the meme-stock phenomenon. It’s why our popular culture has largely chosen to ignore COVID and pretend that the pandemic never happened.4 And it’s why Americans have made themselves so willfully blind about what happened in 2020 that they are seriously considering reelecting the man who managed the greatest failure of the federal government in a century. There’s something about a pandemic that’s different from an economic collapse. Herbert Hoover could never have gotten reelected after the economy collapsed on his watch. People fixated on the cost of his mistakes and were determined never to go back again. But a pandemic is different. No one wants to think too…