Category: You Should See This

In the crowd, I noticed men muttering into walkie-talkies, their eyes hidden behind wraparound shades. To me they had the aspect of children playing at war, only their guns were real. There was a loud bang, and I whirled around as hands moved toward triggers. But someone had only knocked a metal sign onto the pavement.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump has denied or diminished the seriousness of covid-19, from its initial outbreak in China to its spread to Europe and beyond. In interviews with Bob Woodward, for the journalist’s book “Rage,” Trump admitted that he well understood from advisers how lethal and fast-spreading the disease could be, but in public statements he downplayed the danger, saying repeatedly that the virus would disappear with the summer’s warm weather and that there was little to worry about. To the despair of the scientific and medical communities, which have uniformly said that the disease can be best contained if people wear protective masks and maintain a social distance, Trump has repeatedly flouted their advice and touted disreputable treatments. As recently as Tuesday’s Presidential debate, in Cleveland, Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing masks and practicing social distancing. “I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said sarcastically of Biden, at the debate. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking two hundred feet away from him, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

Ordinarily, allegations like those that have trailed Guilfoyle would likely prove disqualifying for someone seeking a prominent role in the political arena, particularly in a party trying to close a gender gap. But high-profile female Trump supporters like Guilfoyle provide valuable cover for the President. As Susan Faludi, the feminist author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” points out, “From Amy Coney Barrett to Betsy DeVos to Kimberly Guilfoyle, every woman Trump picks is an emblem of everything women are up against.”

A reader of the Times bombshell, then, can reasonably ask, how is this different from the last bombshell? How is it different from the memoirs by Mary Trump and Michael Cohen? From calling fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers”? From all the generals, intelligence officers, and government officials telling Bob Woodward in “Rage” that Trump poses a threat to national security that is even more grave than anyone imagines? Four years ago, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” This might have seemed overheated at the time—the result of a former collaborator’s guilty conscience—and yet, in Woodward’s new book, we read of Secretary of Defense James Mattis sleeping in his clothes at night for fear that he’ll have to race back to the office because the needless war of words between two erratic leaders, Trump and Kim Jong Un, might lead to an unspeakable conflagration.

The notion of reaching out to the Williams family or other massacre descendants during the development did not occur to him, Lindelof said, though the production team did consult with the Greenwood Cultural Center and used various primary-source documents. “It didn’t feel like it was appropriation. It felt like we were telling history,” he said. Entertainment conglomerates, such as Warner Media, HBO’s parent company, have used trademark and copyright laws to protect their intellectual property for decades. For large corporations and wealthy families, such legal maneuvers are easy. For average people, seeing their stories come to light is often assumed to be payment enough.

But even for Trump, there was something particularly over the top about his debate performance on Tuesday night. It was more of a primal scream than a political appearance, a rant by a man who not only cannot control himself but, for some reason, thinks he does not have to try. Who could this possibly have been designed to persuade? For the last few months, as polls have shown the decisive suburbs slipping away from him, Trump has talked about his appeal to the “suburban housewives” of America. If there is a single additional suburban housewife, or any woman, who is voting for Trump after that debate, I would like to meet her. The bottom line is that Trump’s chances for a second term are dwindling fast. He knows it. Which is why he will not shut up, on the debate stage or anywhere else, for the next thirty-four days. At this point, there is only one way to get Donald Trump to shut up. “Elections have consequences,” he said, in his very first answer of the evening. To which America will soon have its chance to reply: yes, they do.

Small or large, personal or industrial—retrieving anything from space is immensely difficult, and has been done on just a handful of occasions. The military tracks about twenty-six thousand artifacts orbiting Earth, but its catalogue recognizes only objects larger than ten centimetres; the total number is much greater. By one estimate, there are a hundred million bits of debris that are a millimetre in size, a hundred trillion as small as a micron. We live in a corona of trash.

Wallace kept trying to get the President to say that he would play by the normal rules, but each exchange only encouraged Trump to signal that he wouldn’t. A few minutes earlier, Wallace had asked the President about right-wing militia groups. Trump responded, “What do you want me to call them?” The Proud Boys, Biden said, from the other podium, naming a prominent far-right group. Trump said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Biden flashed a big grin, which covered some of the chill of the moment: Had Trump meant to condemn the right-wing militias or encourage them? The Proud Boys’ chairman, Enrique Tarrio, wrote online, “Standing by sir.”

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

As Election Day approaches, the President has escalated his level of incitement. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last week, a battle with the Democrats in the Senate is almost inevitable. Trump has already moved from allegations of fraud to intimations of unlawfulness and violence. “Gotta be careful with those ballots,” he said on September 8th, in a speech in North Carolina. “Watch those ballots. I don’t like it.” He continued, “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” Trump has advised his supporters to vote twice—once by absentee and once at the polls, to make sure their votes count. (This would be a crime.) He has expressed sympathy for the anti-Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who fired paintballs at their adversaries in Portland, and has defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the pro-Trump vigilante who is accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’ ” In light of these provocations, it seems that anything short of a landslide for either Biden or Trump could lead to chaos. It’s unsurprising that, when the Transition Integrity Project, a group of a hundred bipartisan experts, ran a series of simulations, they concluded that “the potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

In less than a day, Nhung’s Instagram account had ten thousand new followers—and many of them were attacking her. Things got so out of control that she changed her account setting to private. Although she was lying in a hospital bed, people kept claiming to see her bustling about the city. One user came across a photograph of a woman who looked like Nhung at the grand opening of a Uniqlo, and reposted the image on Instagram, announcing to her followers that Nhung was partying while sick. Another user posted a picture of a different look-alike walking along Ta Hien, Hanoi’s night-life strip, and suggested that Nhung was casually infecting passersby. Next came a rumor that Nhung had gone to visit her boyfriend in Vinhomes Times City, an upscale district.

The leaked chat logs appear to reveal that some members of the Patriot Coalition have taken part in multiple violent rallies throughout the summer, and that they claim to have operated a series of vigilante patrols and checkpoints during the Oregon wildfires. While the chats appear to show they work and fight alongside members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, American Wolf and 1776 2.0, the Patriot Coalition seems to have no coherent ideology beyond a desire to violently confront leftists in the name of the police and President Trump. A user identified as Paige summed up the general feelings of the group in a post made ahead of a what turned out to be a bloody ‘Back the Blue’ rally on August 22nd  in Portland when she wrote: “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing.”