George Packer does not hold back in this editorial in the Atlantic: “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.” He shows how the U.S. reacted ineptly to the threat of the pandemic. Packer visited the John Adams in 2019 to discuss his book about Richard Holbrooke.
However, he does not simply lay blame at the feet of Donald Trump and instead goes back in time, to explore how the two main political parties lost their credibility and opened the way for someone like Trump.