10 newyork| february17–march1, 2020
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A se condtermforTrumpseemsmorepossiblethanever.But whatwouldit looklike?PHOTOGRAPHS: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES (CROWD); ROBERT ALEXANDER/GETTY IMAGES (TRUMP LETTERING)
Photo-illustrations by Joe Darrowhere is one starting point for contemplating a
second Trump term: The Ukraine scandal only
became a Trump scandal because Ukraine refused
to submit to a pair of presidential demands that
would have been fairly easy to satisfy. If Ukrainian
president Volodymyr Zelensky had merely
announced that he was looking into a mysterious
missing Democrat r and corruption by the
Bidens, then the w ir probably wouldn’t have
become a Trump scandal at all. It would have
become, to the American news-consuming public, a
Biden scandal. Ukraine held off, though, for a verysensible reason. Ukrainians, analyzing American
politics, calculated that Trump may not stay in office
much beyond this year. It was a hedge against for-
ever Trumpism.
Trump’s favorable rating fell faster than any other
president-elect’s in the history of polling, dropping
below 50 percent even before his inauguration, a fact
that made him look to most civilians as well as politi-
cians like a probable one-termer from the get-go. The
assumption that his election was a terrible mistake
that would be corrected in four years has been an
invisible force propping up the resistance both