There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.
In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Vladimir Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”
And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?...
