Category: You Should See This

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.”

In any case, the inner workings of Trump’s mind aren’t of much consequence. As the President, what matters are his words and actions. Right now, he is launching a dangerous attack on U.S. democracy. Even as he seeks to undermine the voting process and stack the Supreme Court before Election Day, he is stepping up voter-suppression efforts aimed at minority groups that tend to vote Democratic. And despite a couple of objections from individual Republican senators, his party, the Party of Lincoln, is overwhelmingly behind him. At a White House press conference on Wednesday evening, a reporter asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election. “We’re gonna have to see what happens,” he replied. This is how democracies decay and die.

The other new slogan, which Trump has had less success in encouraging his fans to take up, is “we love you!” Trump claims that this chant began spontaneously at a rally a few days ago, but even his fans don’t seem to be buying that. “This chant is going on, like it’s crazy, and it’s ‘We love you, we love you, we love you,’ ” he said at a second Ohio rally on Monday. “And, you know what . . . I don’t want to say it. I’m just saying, they have not been able to find in the history of politics in this nation—even, we loved Ronald Reagan. But they have not been able to find where people broke out and said ‘We love you’ about—I guess I have to call myself a politician. . . . No, but think of it. How nice is that? I never heard it.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, the day the U.S. officially passed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic, Trump was asked why he had not said anything about the grim milestone. He listened to the reporter’s question, then turned away. “Uh, anybody else?” he asked. Because of all the horrors and lies that preceded it, and all that are sure to follow, the President’s callous disregard was not a major story but just another viral video in a news cycle full of them. Trump has succeeded in conditioning us to believe that the week’s news, while awful, is less so because the awfulness is so consistent. Awful is the new Trumpian normal, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the old Trump-era normal was already pretty bad. He has rendered us collectively incapable of outrage, just when we need it most. If we can’t be appalled at the President’s indifference toward two hundred thousand dead Americans, then there is nothing left that can horrify us. After all, the covid-19 death toll so far is the biggest mass-casualty event in American history aside from the Civil War, the Second World War, and the 1918 flu pandemic.

In the video, Troye recounts when Trump, a noted germaphobe, met with the coronavirus task force, early on in the crisis, and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “disgusting people” at his rallies and other public events. During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”

As to when do you go off the rails, the answer is when somebody says something that’s really funny. Suddenly you realize there is a comedy idea there that wasn’t there five seconds before, and it’s almost as good as an orgasm. David Sherlock, who was Graham’s boyfriend, would be downstairs, and we’d be upstairs, and suddenly he would hear an enormous amount of noise—shrieking and drumming of feet—and that was the moment when we both saw that there was a great comic possibility.

In 2008, Hawke married Ryan Shawhughes, a month before their first daughter, Clementine, was born. Shawhughes, who had worked briefly as a nanny for him and Thurman while she was a student at Columbia University, “turned his life around,” according to O’Brien. As well as managing Hawke’s finances, she has collaborated with him artistically, co-producing “First Reformed,” “Seymour,” a film version of his novel “The Hottest State,” and “Blaze,” a 2018 bio-pic about the country singer Blaze Foley, which was Hawke’s first major outing as a director. In 2011, Hawke called his mother to tell her that Shawhughes was pregnant with their second child, Indiana. As he remembers it, Leslie said, “Ethan, you’re gonna go broke. You have so many children. You’re crazy.” She hung up and then called right back. “I take that back,” she said. “The best thing that could happen to you and your children is you go broke. You need to keep your hunger alive. Have more children. Just don’t stop making good art.”

If Donald Trump possessed a soul, a trace of conscience or character, he would resign the Presidency. He will not resign the Presidency.

The reviewers at the Times and the Washington Post have already had their shots at Woodward’s book. His latest work has prompted as much fury on their part at the cowardly group of sycophants and enablers surrounding the President as at Trump himself. All of us already know that Trump is a charlatan, a con man, a fool. But isn’t it infuriating that these decorated generals and self-professed Christians have spoken privately with Woodward but have refused to level with the American people? Perhaps it’s “a tale not of character but of complicity,” as Jennifer Szalai wrote in the Times. “What makes the book noteworthy is Woodward’s sad and subtle documentation of the ego, cowardice and self-delusion that, over and over, lead intelligent people to remain silent in the face of Trumpian outrages,” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, concluded, in a review for the Post.

To access the Trump app, users must share their cell-phone numbers with the campaign. “The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” Parscale told Reuters. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.” Michael Marinaccio, the chief operating officer of Data Trust, a private Republican data company, said recently that “what’s new this year, or at least a sense of urgency, is getting as many cell-phone numbers as we can in the voter file data.” An effective way to do that is to entice supporters to share not only their own cell-phone numbers with the campaign but those of their contacts as well. One estimate, by Eliran Sapir, the C.E.O. of Apptopia, a mobile-analytics company, is that 1.4 million app downloads could provide upward of a hundred million phone numbers. This will enable the Trump campaign to find and target people who have not consented to handing over their personal information. It’s not unlike how Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the data of nearly ninety million unsuspecting Facebook users, only this time it is one’s friends, family, and acquaintances who are willfully handing over the data for a chance to get a twenty-five-dollar discount on a maga hat.

The F.B.I. agents touched on the indictment, but asked mainly about projects that could be connected to Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities—research in which Asgari had played no part—and about colleagues at Sharif whose names the Bureau had culled from his e-mails. Asgari refused to answer these questions. Instead, he responded with a Persian parable. A man made friends with a bear because he believed that he needed a strong protector. One night, while the man slept, a fly landed on his face. The bear was indeed very protective—he crushed the fly with a boulder, killing the man. The moral? “Don’t make friends with stupid people, even if they’re very strong,” Asgari said.