Shorter America This Week: Things are not normal; Muskism; Good men
In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 28 Aug 2026 13.09 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/Joe Castro
In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
If you only followed mainstream coverage of the Pre-COP Leaders' visit to Tuvalu, you could be forgiven for thinking the big issue was headwear.
Sometimes it really does feel like there’s no justice in the universe.
This week:
Collective grief is such a beautiful, precious thing. There’s so much to read and listen to in the aftermath of Dolly’s death. If you haven’t already, I can’t recommend Tressie MacMillan Cottom’s essay “The Dolly Moment” highly enough. It’s five years old now, and all the more extraordinary for it. It’s the reason I follow MacMillan Cottom’s work so closely. She has a follow up in the NYT this week: “Loving Dolly was easy. Understanding her was hard.”
My first podcast was called “Barely Gettin’ By”, in honour of Dolly. On the day she died, my co-host and brilliant friend, Chloe, put it best:
“hundreds of years from now, historians (if there are historians) will cite today as the day America died.”
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I hope Chloe is wrong, but she never is. I’ve been thinking a lot, of course, about the looming midterm elections and what they might tell us about the death, or not, of America. It’s very hard to be both pundit-brainy about this election cycle and to try to work through how the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy might play out.
I worry that in the last few weeks this column might have fallen a bit too heavily on the pundit-brain side, and so this week I’m offering a corrective: some pieces outlining the breadth and scope of Trump’s attacks on American democracy and the rule of law.
The Center for American Policy – which, incidentally, Trump is threatening to sue for $5 billion because they published a research report he didn’t like – has a detailed report on how the Trump administration is interfering in the midterms. The LA Times has a shorter summary, and an outline of how Democrats are preparing for all possible scenarios. And here’s another one, by George Chidi, in The Guardian.
None of what I wrote above is a prediction. There are so many constantly moving parts, and nobody knows how they will (or won’t) fit together. But the picture is grim.
So I’ll leave you with this: Dolly covering Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” with Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstat. I listened to it on a loop while I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, as a reminder of the beauty that persists in the world, despite everything.
Hold your girls tight x
