dwell for a moment on the awfulness of Tillerson.
He came to office with no discernible worldview other than the jaded transactionalism he acquired as ExxonMobil’s C.E.O. He leaves office with no discernible accomplishment except a broken department and a traumatized staff.
Six of the 10 top positions at State are vacant; even now the United States does not have an ambassador to South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa or the European Union, among other posts.
.. he did seem to figure out that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. But that’s progress only because he was previously the Russian despot’s premier apologist.
.. he opposed the president’s two best foreign policy decisions: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and decertifying the Iran deal.
.. Some secretaries of state — Colin Powell, for instance — alienate their bosses by siding with the bureaucracy. Others, like Henry Kissinger, do the opposite. Tillerson is the rare bird who managed to do both.
.. unlike Tillerson, he will have credibility with foreign governments. Just as importantly, he’s been willing to contradict the president, meaning he’ll be able to act as a check on him, too.
Trump isn’t going to be disciplined by someone whose views are dovish or establishmentarian. But he might listen to, and be tempered by, a responsible hawk.
.. The notion that Kim Jong-un is going to abandon his nuclear arsenal is risible. What, other than reunification of Korea on Pyongyang’s terms, would Kim exchange his arsenal for?
Equally risible is the idea that his regime will ever abide by the terms of a deal. North Korea violates every agreement it signs.
.. might strike it at South Korea’s and perhaps Japan’s expense. This president has never been particularly fond of our two closest Asian allies, much less of the cost to the United States of aiding in their defense.
.. The promise of Pompeo is that he can provide ballast against some of Trump’s other gusts, particularly when it comes to the Kremlin.
- On Syria, he dismisses the possibility of a collaborative relationship with Russia.
- On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he insists, “America has an obligation to push back.”
- On WikiLeaks, he calls it a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
- On Russian interference in the U.S. election, he acknowledges it as incontrovertible fact and warns of the “Gerasimov doctrine” — the Russian conviction that it can use disinformation to win a bloodless war with the West.
.. If the thought that Putin has strings to pull with this president alarms you, Pompeo’s presence should be reassuring. However much you might otherwise disagree with him, the guy who graduated first in his class from West Point is not a Russian stooge.
.. he’d be smart to model his behavior on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the administration’s one undisputed star, who thrives in his job because he’s plainly not afraid of losing it, much less of speaking his mind.
Why Donald Trump’s tweets are only going to get worse
Like others who feel frustrated by their day jobs, the president vents on social media.
Trump is tweeting like a crazy old man for three reasons. First, he has little choice but to spend the next six months or so — at a minimum — on thorny issues that have little upside for him:
- North Korea,
- a longer-term lift of the debt ceiling, funding the federal government,
- dealing with the “dreamers.”
All of these issues will require him to make compromises that are necessary but are of little benefit to him. In these circumstances, Twitter can function as a venue for him to blow off steam.
Second, in dealing with all of these issues, Trump will have to do things that will alienate the parts of his base that believed in him. In the past week, we have seen the likes of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Mickey Kaus go ballistic about the possibility of a deal on the dreamers. The easiest way for Trump to counteract any criticism he gets from Trump-friendly pundits is to feed his base some form of red meat. Tweets about Hillary Clinton could do the trick.
.. Third, Trump possesses such an oppositional personality that he needs to find ways to rebel against the constraints that John F. Kelly has placed on his White House staff. As his sycophants depart, Twitter is the one place where he can quickly get a similar hit of flattery.
.. Yes, most of his tweets are outrageous, but they are also toothless. Some might argue that simply shrugging off deranged tweets is normalizing the Trump administration. The thing is, we are only nine months into the lamest administration in modern history. Outrage needs to be conserved as a resource for the important stuff... It is a little more surprising to see him squander the one tool he mastered during the presidential campaign. Back in January, his bravado on Twitter seemed genuinely menacing. In the run-up to Inauguration Day, he could tweet at a company and its stock price buckled... What has changed in the past nine months is that Trump has been proven to be a weak and feckless president... At this point, when Trump promises or threatens on Twitter, no one believes him. As he acts more and more hysterical online, he will further erode his ability to use social media to set the agenda.
What the Next Round of Alt-Right Rallies Will Reveal
White nationalists all generally agree white people should be in charge, but they have many different competing beliefs about why that is the case, and how white rule should be implemented. These differences are not trivial, and for decades they have prevented a broadly concerted campaign of action by white nationalists in America.
.. Prior to Fields’s attack, Charlottesville was on track to be a clear victory for the alt-right. While attendance of 500 people is a pittance compared to most mainstream political events, it represents a marked upswing from 2016. Simply turning out that many people in one place was an unqualified win.
The fact that few participants sought to conceal their identities was a bold statement about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, which did not go unnoticed during an ominous torch-wielding event the night before the formal rally. Even after the “Unite the Right” rally itself was shut down by authorities as an unlawful assembly in the face of escalating violence, the event was seen as a show of strength.
.. When “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler attempted to hold a press conference on Sunday in Charlottesville, he was chased away by a crowd of people shouting “murderer” and “shame.”
.. The question now is how the alt-right will process the backlash, and an early indicator will be seen in Saturday’s marches and rallies.Terrorism is a double-edged sword. While it can help mobilize the most radical segments of an extremist movement, it simultaneously alienates the least radical, including people who are loosely supportive of an extremist movement, or tolerant or dismissive of its rhetorical excesses... it is unclear how those within the alt-right will process its meaning. In the first 24 hours, online adherents responded predictably, with a mix of
- denialism,
- whataboutism,
- victim-blaming,
- disavowals of Fields, and
- the advancement of conspiracy theories to explain the problem away.
.. If attendance is high and the participants include more of the same Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists in garish costumes and armed to the teeth, it would be hard to interpret that as anything less than extremely alarming.
.. An aggressive showing by antifa groups looking to meet violence with violence could lead to further escalation
.. Some portion of the alt-right is more enamored of Trumpism than of white nationalism.
.. The only certainty is that the week ahead is bound to be interesting and consequential. By the time we reach the other side, Americans will likely have a much clearer picture of the shape and direction of white-nationalist extremism in America.
How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump
Trump and Bee are on different sides politically, but culturally they are drinking from the same cup, one filled with the poisonous nectar of reality TV and its baseless values ..
.. Trump and Bee share a penchant for verbal cruelty and a willingness to mock the defenseless. Both consider self-restraint, once the hallmark of the admirable, to be for chumps.
.. When John Oliver told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right.
.. When Republicans see these harsh jokes—which echo down through the morning news shows and the chattering day’s worth of viral clips, along with those of Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers—they don’t just see a handful of comics mocking them. They see HBO, Comedy Central, TBS, ABC, CBS, and NBC. In other words, they see exactly what Donald Trump has taught them: that the entire media landscape loathes them, their values, their family, and their religion.
.. Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, was representative: “This photo will be in history books and the caption will not be about how Jimmy Fallon is such a fun nice guy”), and rightly so.
.. getting a noogie from a comic on late-night television is now considered a “normalizing” activity for a presidential candidate. The implication is that you’re not fit for executive office unless you can clown for us on the tube when we’re half awake.
.. Paar invites audience members to ask their own questions of the senator. “Let’s have, you know, responsible questions from responsible people,” Paar says, and I waited for the laugh, but it didn’t come. It wasn’t a joke.
.. This was a chance to interview someone who wanted to be the president, and Paar asked his audience members to act accordingly—which they did.
.. The new age officially began with Bill Clinton’s 1992 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, playing his saxophone.
.. This was the president as entertainer, the president as a guy so young and so cool that he could slide right onto the set of the most with-it late-night show and sit in with the band.
Who couldn’t love this guy? Well, possibly the family of Ricky Ray Rector, the retarded man on Arkansas’s death row, whom Clinton had cruelly allowed to be executed just five months earlier to prove he was tough on crime.
.. soon President Bubba .. would be telling an MTV crowd whether he wore boxers or briefs
.. We are a country with the greatest creed in all of history—the Constitution of the United States—yet we are looking more and more like a banana republic.