Let’s say Donald Trump manages to romp his way to the White House in November. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik paints a dire picture of what will follow: “If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump.”

Gopnik goes on to assure us that “Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right — not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal.”

I don’t think I can be accused of being a Trump apologist; I’ve written a lot of words about the man, few of them kind. Nonetheless, I find Gopnik’s essay to be, well, a bit hyperbolic.

Take the notion that countries don’t recover from unstable authoritarian nationalists. It sounds true, because it seems as if it ought to be. But Gopnik fails to marshal much evidence.