The Editors
Editors’ Note | The House Never Chickens Out
The Editors
You may have noticed that Donald Trump often seems to change his mind. His record of abruptly backing off dangerous courses of action to which he had previously committed himself — from tariffs to civilizational annihilation — inspired the slogan “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out). For a while, TACO was a reassuring thought. It conjured up an image of a weak, flailing president who was playing with empty threats but...
Editors’ Note | Millennial Pink
The Editors
It seems likely that future historians — assuming they aren’t just leading us in oral recitation of Simpsons episodes around our post-electric bonfires — will remember 2025 as an inflection point in millennials’ path to power. The year began with JD Vance’s inauguration as the first millennial vice president, and it will end with Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the first millennial mayor of New York. In between these bookends, Bari...
Editors’ Note | The View from Somewhere
The Editors
Much about the world in which we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of The Drift would have startled us when we published our first issue in the summer of 2020 — including the fact that we’ve managed to hang on for this long. At the time, it was difficult to imagine any aspect of the future with much clarity. A global pandemic had thrown our lives into a still, repetitive...
Editors’ Note | Country Over Party
The Editors
Joe Biden’s first campaign for president, in the 1988 election cycle, met with a swift and ignominious demise. The Delaware senator’s attempts to cast himself as the candidate of youth and change — the standard-bearer of the “Pepsi Generation,” a Kennedy for the ’80s — fell flat. (Perhaps voters had some premonition of the senescent egomaniac we know today.) Three months after the campaign’s launch, the scandals, or, more precisely,...
Editors’ Note | Walled Off
The Editors
Everything about the hulking, sclerotic American state seems to move on autopilot. The levers of power — let alone of hope or change, the watchwords of another, now-distant election season — appear entirely out of reach. The illusion that the American electorate will in any meaningful way “make its voice heard” is looking especially threadbare this year. Free (or free-ish) elections are by definition not entirely predictable, but this fall’s...
