| On Tuesday, Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the Presidency. Unlike the career that preceded it, the announcement, made at Mar-a-Lago, surprised virtually no one. Since Trump declared his first bid for the White House, in 2015, he has been consistent only in his ability to upend expectations, a pattern that reached its apex on the night he won—despite his racism, despite the “Access Hollywood” tape, despite the polls. Late on the night of Trump’s victory, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, absorbed the shock of the preceding hours in “An American Tragedy,” a bracing summation of a demagogue’s rise—and, in hindsight, a strikingly accurate prediction of what was to come. Remnick didn’t hold back. “It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety,” he wrote. As Trump embarks on another campaign, it’s instructive to look back at recent history for reminders of how it happened, and of how it could happen again. | 
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