But 2020 has already proved transformative enough, as the volatile COVID-19 pandemic threatens lives, forces millions into isolation, immobilizes worldwide markets, and possibly sets the stage for our president to dispute election results if they do not go in his favor.

Of course, people say that about every presidential election, especially the candidates who are running for office. We are more than forty years removed from the events chronicled in Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland-and, as I write this, less than three months away from another presidential election that promises to be as transformative as the Reagan-Carter showdown. The incoming president? Nothing can harsh this guy’s mellow on this bright-and-frosty “morning in America,” as television ads later named the historic moment. He’ll smile like that again someday, but it’ll never be the same. When things were going better for him four years earlier, his full-bore eighty-watt grin was his calling card, his ticket to glory. The outgoing president, giving the side-eye to his successor, stoically bears what one might view as an enigmatic half-smile. THEY’RE BOTH ON THE BOOK’S COVER, in the backseat of a limo, winner and loser of the 1980 presidential sweepstakes, riding, one presumes, to the inauguration of the one on the (so to speak) right.

Before the storm rick perlstein