Two with negative legacies are Robert Moses, who built New York’s highway and park systems, and Milton Friedman, who gave corporations carte blanche to abandon social goals. Their ideas and actions have had wide-ranging and negative effects nationwide.

As Mary Trump notes, the stakes are too high for guys like Jon Stewart to get away with neutralizing the toxicity of Donald Trump with comparisons totally lacking in substance. It’s a creepy kind of brand-building. And it comes at the expense of our fragile democracy.

If the pay of the president and members of Congress could be cut when faced with a shutdown, there likely would be no more of them. Unfortunately, like the hope some people have for term limits, the people who have created the problem pay no penalty for their refusal to do what used to be called the right thing.

What’s happening in New York — and is being replicated at the federal level and in Georgia in the 2020 election cases — is law as blood lust. It is a rejection of the Anglo-American legal tradition as it has developed over the centuries to enshrine neutrality and fair play in favor of something that is more personalized and illiberal.