“Man-made global warming is not a scientific certainty; it cannot be proven, nor has it ever been,” Mr. Limbaugh declared on his Friday show, disregarding the mountains of empirical evidence to the contrary. He then pivoted to a popular right-wing talking point: that policies meant to curtail climate change are, in fact, an assault on freedom.
The first hints that Woodward, too, thinks that Trump’s Presidency might be somehow salvageable occur on the first page, when Woodward suggests that Trump might be too “consumed” by impeachment to pay attention to his job. (In classic Woodward fashion, he contradicts himself—or perhaps lets slip the absurdity of the entire formulation—when he mentions, four pages later, that the Super Bowl was also consuming Trump’s attention.) Many of these scenes—and this attitude toward Trump—will be familiar to readers of “Fear,” but the second half of the narrative is distinct because of the presence of Woodward himself. He has never been shy about using himself as a character in his books, whether in some memorable tête-à-têtes with Donald Rumsfeld or his famous account of a deathbed conversation with William Casey, in which the former C.I.A. director admitted having known that money from Iranian arms sales was being funnelled to the Nicaraguan Contras. (Others have questioned the story.)
State Department officials have raised alarms about the legal risk in aiding airstrikes that kill civilians. The Trump administration recently suppressed findings as it sold more weapons to Gulf nations.
“If I were in the State Department, I would be freaking out about my potential for liability,” said Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School professor and a Defense Department lawyer in the Obama administration. “I think anyone who’s involved in this program should get themselves a lawyer. It’s very dangerous territory the U.S. is in, continuing to provide support given the number of civilians who have been killed.”
Even those around the hip-hop artist struggle to explain his motivations for a presidential candidacy that some Democrats worry could siphon votes from Joe Biden.
Across the Indian Ocean, where historically India has held sway, China now controls or helps manage ports, airfields, military bases or observation stations, along the coast of Myanmar and in Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Pakistan, all the way to Djibouti and Kenya. It is also making forays right in America’s backyard, for example, eyeing the Panama Canal.
The ultimate cause of the disaster was the drive to raise profits at any cost—and the cult of the stock price, to which so many venerable companies have conceded.
In 2013, for example, a Boeing engineer suggested installing a computer-based airspeed indicator to supplement the 737 max’s single external speed sensor, the faulty operation of which is suspected of triggering the mcas in the two deadly crashes: Lion Air Flight 610, on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10, 2019. The engineer’s request “was rejected by Boeing management due to cost concerns and because adding synthetic airspeed could have jeopardized the 737 MAX program’s directive to avoid pilot simulator training requirements,” the report says. If Boeing had told airlines that their pilots would need extensive retraining to fly the new planes, including instruction on how to react to an activation of the mcas, the airlines might have been less eager to order them. Not only did Boeing neglect to inform the airlines about the new feature, but it removed any references to the mcas from the operations manual that pilots of the 737 max relied on.
A relative finally ended what was clearly extortion. “I told everybody to stop sending money,” a cousin, Steven Davis, recalled. “He might get beat up, but they will stop when they know they can’t get any more money.”
One night in July 2017, after two pleading calls from his imprisoned cousin, Mr. Davis refused to answer a third. Soon after, the family received another call, this time from the prison chaplain. Mr. Wood had been strangled in his cell. He was 33.
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.
The app, which was developed by the ad broker and software company Phunware, gathers users’ data in an invasive way reminiscent of the methods of Cambridge Analytica.
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.
“This has been one of the major forms of damage, of course along with the deaths and injuries, that have been caused by these wars,” said David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and the lead author of the report. “It tells us that U.S. involvement in these countries has been horrifically catastrophic, horrifically damaging in ways that I don’t think that most people in the United States, in many ways myself included, have grappled with or reckoned with in even the slightest terms.”
A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society.
“I think had any of the scholars who signed the letter contacted me or contacted the Times with concerns [before sending the letter], we would’ve taken those concerns very seriously,” Hannah-Jones said. “And instead there was kind of a campaign to kind of get people to sign on to a letter that was attempting really to discredit the entire project without having had a conversation.”
The Coordinating Council, which Tsikhanouskaya originally selected from a pool of volunteers, has continued accepting applications. Alexievich told me that more than six and a half thousand people have now put in their names, and in the past few days existing members have chosen a hundred and twenty people who will now share decision-making power. Unlike the names of the original members of the council, the names of what’s now called the Expanded Council will be kept secret, to protect them from arrest. “Every day, people keep signing up,” Alexievich said.
Does anything matter anymore in American politics? In the week since Donald Trump’s Convention ended with a personality-cult party on the White House lawn, the President has completely refocussed his campaign on threats to law and order from “Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters.” He has suggested there will be a “Rigged Election”; urged supporters in North Carolina to commit election fraud, by voting twice; and likened protesters demanding racial justice to “Domestic Terrorists.” The President personally ordered a review of federal aid, with the goal of withholding funds from “anarchist” Democratic-run cities that have allowed “themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.” And he has baselessly alleged that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is taking some sort of “enhancement” drug, and claimed that Biden is the pawn of shadowy “dark forces.”
During the meeting, James reportedly focussed on pressuring the owners to do far more than they have. All thirty teams have committed three hundred million dollars across the next ten years toward a foundation empowering the Black community—small change, considering that twenty-two of the league’s owners are billionaires. A million dollars a year is a rounding error for the Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, one of the richest men in the world. The DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic, has spent millions of dollars promoting right-wing causes and candidates; Betsy DeVos is a member of Trump’s Cabinet. Quicken Loans, the company run by Dan Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration fund, and, shortly afterward, benefitted from a tax break originally intended to help the poor. Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, is a Trump supporter who furloughed roughly forty thousand employees from his casino-and-restaurant empire during the shutdown. Tom Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, has made billions in private equity, and frequently donates to Democratic candidates; his firm owns companies that contract with law-enforcement agencies and Border Patrol, including one that makes its money by charging incarcerated people exorbitant rates and fees to make phone calls.
Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.
It helps explain why he and his political allies have spent nearly $60 million of donor money on legal and compliance bills since 2015, far more than any other president.
The likelihood of political violence was also apparent from the start. Trump’s 2016 rallies tipped over into displays of aggression directed at the media and at those who opposed him. Such is the chaos of today that we’ve nearly forgotten that, two years ago, Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Clinton, and fourteen others he believed had treated Trump unfairly. Sayoc pleaded guilty; his lawyers described him as “a Donald Trump super-fan” who suffered from mental illness, leaving him vulnerable to the antagonisms of the political climate. The twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius was charged with fatally shooting twenty-three people in El Paso last year. The language of an anti-immigrant manifesto he allegedly posted before the shooting was noted for its echoes of Trump’s rationalizations for building his border wall. (Crusius pleaded not guilty.) This May, the Michigan legislature temporarily shut down, after armed militia members entered the capitol to protest the state’s stay-at-home order. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
The U.S. President and the bureaucracy reacted slowly to the arrest of Paul Whelan, who was declared a spy and sentenced to sixteen years in a Russian prison colony.
For all their uncertainty about the exact origins of the case, U.S. officials understood perfectly how the Kremlin wanted it resolved. Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was “unbelievably explicit” in meetings with White House officials, according to the former U.S. official. Initially, Antonov proposed trading Whelan for three Russians in U.S. prisons: Maria Butina, a woman who had grown close to Republican operatives and National Rifle Association officials, and was convicted of acting as an unregistered Russian agent, in April, 2019; Viktor Bout, a notoriously prolific arms trader who was apprehended in a sting operation in Thailand, in 2008, and convicted by a U.S. court three years later; and Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot serving a twenty-year federal sentence for a drug-smuggling plot.
