Special to Scoundrel Time: Twenty-two writers imagine how the current administration will end. A Note From the Editor One year ago today, we launched Scoundrel Time in response to the devastating U.S. presidential election and clear...
How It Ends
How It Ends: Revolving Door
This image conveys both hope and fear. Hope that we can move past this tragic episode and fear that we may not. To the extent that the 2016 election reflects all that’s wrong with our country, moving forward should also be a struggle to learn...
How It Ends: After Trump
Come and see. A red-haired woman dances barefoot on the asphalt on one side of the street. An elderly man with a cane tries to keep up with her and bursts into laughter as he almost loses his balance. Two olive-skinned young men make music with...
How It Ends: Last Words
The presidential bedroom is covered in gold leaf and glimmers dimly in the predawn darkness. The President is in bed. He reaches out of the golden comforter for the remote. On the giant screen, a man sits beside a woman at a translucent desk. The...
How It Ends: The Donald’s Going
The Donald’s Going (With apologies to W.B. Yeats) Rooting and rooting in the White House drain The plumber cannot hear the moving men; Things go in boxes; the hairspray takes up four; Marine One has lifted from the lawn, The orange-tinged...
How It Ends: The House
The sponge on the counter reeks faintly and the kitty-cat clock is stuck at 10:05, such a non-time, morning or night, it doesn’t matter. The whole house is like a bad belly, swollen with gross nostalgia: the old-timey radio, the Formica table, the...
How It Ends: The Message from Mississippi
It’s hard to imagine the end of the Trump presidency when you live in a place that supports him. Mississippi gave Donald Trump all six of its Electoral College votes as well as 57.9% of the state’s popular vote, which makes it hard to escape his...
How It Ends: Wonderland/Wasteland
I was raised by a father who self-described as a “realistic optimist” and a mother who oscillated between bracing for the apocalypse and buying outfits for the award ceremony. So it’s no surprise that my own predictive tendencies are tangled up in...
How It Ends: Downward Muslimah
When they came for me, I wasn’t expecting it. Every day since the election, I’ve felt just a little less safe, but I never thought they’d actually round us up. Even after the ban, I still had hope. I’m an American citizen, an attorney who knows what...
How It Ends: Unspeakable
I told Ina I would never speak to her again. We had been friends of a sort since our twenties—hung out in the same bars, showed up at feminist rallies and marches together—but she was increasingly one of those politicos who find fuel for neurotic...
How It Ends: April Fools
On April 1, 1988, my college newspaper published an April Fools article about Donald Trump buying Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center and proclaiming himself its president. It was the last semester of my freshman year and by that point...
How It Ends: How the Best of Us Goes
Tell me the story again, the boy says sitting before a cold, dusty fireplace. His father sighs. How many times have I told you the story? the father says. You’re too old for the story. It’s something I told you because the world didn’t make sense...
How It Ends: The Everything Bagel Seder
The morning after we cast our votes, informing them by simple majority, in the Electoral College, and in truth that our liberty has had enough of being diminished, grabbed, fondled, ridden roughly, and otherwise abused to great delight of the tax...
How It Ends: The Trump Mothers Speak
And then, finally, we descended: tens of thousands of women in America, coming to the White House trying to take back the country. We were all dressed as Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the mother of Donald Trump. We came from every state, from...
How It Ends: Follow the Money
A few years ago I read a biography of Al Capone. I learned a lot about him. He was a good dancer. He had tertiary syphilis that probably caused his erratic mood swings. He grew up a block away from me in Brooklyn. When he got to Chicago, his...
How It Ends: #ThemToo
In the video—because there are cameras in every room of that house—he’s walking ahead of her down the stairs and then, perhaps sensing she isn’t following, reaches behind him for her hand. He does it without turning and so he...
How It Ends: I Remember (Life before 2017)
After Joe Brainard I remember, as a very small girl, seeing Gerald Ford lose the White House, on TV. I remember thinking I saw him cry. I remember then, when I believed politicians had feelings. I remember later, when George H. W. Bush...
How It Ends: Inside the Trump Museum
It’s afternoon outside the Trump Museum, and a small crowd of people has entered the park gates and are surging toward the left entrance. There are always so many more people when the Women’s Brigade are in charge of security, recognizable by their...
How It Ends: What Comes Next
For the light of heart: dancing cat emojis and Grumpy Cat GIFS. For the TV-obsessive: war on North Korea. For the New Year’s Resolutionist: lobster truffle mac n cheese at Dean and Deluca’s: I’ve always wanted to taste this. I don’t know how...
How It Ends – Or Doesn’t
How is the ongoing shitstorm that is Donald Trump’s administration going to end? Though everyone on earth has noted his unpredictability, his year in office may have established, paradoxically, that it’s not so hard to predict where Trump himself is...
How It Ends: But Her Emails
Following his conviction for money laundering, racketeering, assault, fraud, obstruction, and treasonous plotting with foreign entities, the current White House squatter will be tossed out of the building along with his portraits (those fake Time...
How It Ends: Wanna Bet?
The election of Donald Trump was not a triumph of conservatism or any other set of political values. Like the upsurge of nativist and far-right movements in many other countries, and even the rise of Islamic extremism, it was a huge and...