Rehearsing for the Apocalypse

WHEN KAREN RUSSELL STARTED writing her new novel The Antidote, Trump hadn’t yet gained a second term. When we spoke in March, Trump hadn’t taken over the Kennedy Center, revoked NEA grants, torn apart climate protections, or sent worldwide markets into an uncertain tailspin. When I finished transcribing our conversation, Stephen Miller was a day away from floating the idea of nixing habeas corpus, and Kristi Noem was 12 days away from demonstrating that she doesn’t know what the term—Latin for “you have the body,” a bulwark, at its core, against wrongful, top-down storytelling—means.