The NYT is doing its best to persuade us that Trump is not inevitable. It’s true; he isn’t. The polls have always shown him to be more unpopular that not. The reactionary base only represents about a third of the electorate. Finally, of all of the elections in which Trump was directly or indirectly on the ballot, he only won one, and that by a handful of votes in a few swing states.
So he can be beaten. But there is a good reason for those feelings of learned helplessness; we know perfectly well that Trump and his followers don’t play by the same rules of liberal democracy that we do. Their sense of entitlement is so strong that they are willing to do practically anything to seize power. They have guns, too, and we don’t.
We are looking at either four years of fascism or a renewed insurrection by the same bizarre coalition of pagans and Christian nationalists after November. If that isn’t reason to be depressed, I don’t know what is.