On Thursdays, in our weekly “let’s nail down the next issue” editorial meeting, we usually finalize not just our cover story, but our cover image, or at least the general gist. We knew this week’s cover would be the election, but just what it was going to say was anyone’s guess, so Art Director Zeke Barbaro plotted different iterations for different scenarios: if Biden won handily; if the outcome was still uncertain as we went to press Wednesday; if the Texas Lege turned blue; if the worst happened and Trump won reelection.
For that last scenario, we already had a cover image on deck, one that our previous art director, Jason Stout, designed “just in case” for the 2016 election – a smoking apocalypse-scape, all rubble and American flags in tatters. Despite our desolation at Trump’s surprise win in 2016, in the end, the editorial staff agreed that the image was too bleak and we instead chose for the cover a simple message of perseverance and resilience.
I’ve second-guessed our decision quite a few times over the past four years. That picture of ruin, if not literally prophetic, certainly feels more representative of what life under Trump’s rule has been like.
As I write this column at noon on Wednesday, votes are still being counted, and we do not know who won the presidential election. By the time you read this on Thursday, maybe we know. Maybe the count is still ongoing. Maybe we’ve shifted from counting to recounting to court battles. We knew this uncertainty, the waiting, was a strong possibility.
Still.
Whoever ends up winning this thing, I cannot help but feel dejected. This election was an opportunity for the country to emphatically reject the chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration and the Republican party that enabled it. That didn’t happen.
Millions of Americans took the measure of how far we’ve sunk and decided they were okay with it. Even endorsed it. They assessed Trump’s “accomplishments” – the resurgence of white supremacists, the thuggery of his supporters who plot assassinations and demand his political rivals be jailed, the rigging of the system to benefit the wealthiest and whitest, the war against science and the media and just plain civility, the endless gaslighting, my god, the children in cages … They took it all in and said, “More of that, please.”
And that is why we went with this cover. I think it captures the anguish so many of us feel right now, and the resolve, too, to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep hoping for the best in each other despite such dispiriting evidence to the contrary.
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This article appears in November 6 • 2020.
