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The New Regularly Scheduled Flight 93 Election

The fact “Flight 93 election” has been resurrected for this election, and will be for each successive election, gives lie to the premise

Andrew Donaldson
6 min readSep 10, 2020
On board Southwest Airlines aircraft empty interior 9 November 2010. Kevin Dooley via Wikimedia Commons

Four years ago, nearly to the day, Rush Limbaugh took to his golden microphone and read to his audience — the largest audience in talk radio, as he relentlessly reminds us — verbatim an article which had, to that point, been given little notice. The rest, as they say, is history. The article was entitled “The Flight 93 Election” written under a pseudonym by Michael Anton, and it exploded into the political discourse. Retelling that recent history is where Will Lloyd kicks off his Spectator piece chatting with Anton about his latest election season book and metaphorically equally apocalyptic The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.

Had the President, I thought, really played no role in this chaos? In 500 pages of The Stakes, Trump barely gets a look in — he is strangely absent, yet his presence is blatantly apparent, like an amputated limb. When Anton attacks his targets, he lambasts them, Trump-style. His positive case for the President is short, summed up when he writes, ‘There’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.’

Yet after four years of Trump, America

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Andrew Donaldson
Andrew Donaldson

Written by Andrew Donaldson

Writer. Mountaineer diaspora. Veteran. Managing Editor @ordinarytimemag on culture & politics, food writing @yonderandhome, Host @heardtellshow & other media

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