Tag: Reading

Twitter and other social-media platforms are exposing lawmakers’ infirmities to new and harsher scrutiny, violating an unspoken culture of complicity and coverup. Prior to the recent reëlection of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Internet was ablaze with close-up photos of his bandaged, purple hands, setting off wild speculation about the health of the seventy-eight-year-old Republican from Kentucky. The physical and mental fitness of Trump, who is seventy-four, and Joe Biden, who is seventy-eight, have also been extensively covered. “In the 24/7 news cycle we have now, you can’t really hide,” one former top aide to Feinstein told me.

Byrne told me that he immediately wondered if Butina was a “red sparrow”—a reference to the 2013 novel that was turned into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, in which a former ballerina becomes a spy for the Russian government, seducing and killing her targets. Before their lunch, Byrne said, he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers, which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa, and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink.

That November 4 missive James retweeted from his campaign adviser—“Stop making up numbers, stalling the process and cheating the system”—has since been deleted. But there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.

But Trump knew precisely what he was doing, and he never let up. During a meeting at Trump Tower, Leslie Stahl, of CBS News, asked why he kept attacking the press. “You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that, when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

“Oh yeah, don’t worry about that. They’ll never catch me,” the source boasted. He said he was using multiple proxies that made it nearly impossible for anyone to find him, and he was never going to set foot on Brazilian soil again. The call was about four minutes long—Greenwald kept it short, but said he wanted to see the documents. “OK, I’m gonna just start uploading them to your phone,” the source said. He told Greenwald it would take between 12 to 15 hours to finish uploading.

The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that