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.
Ivanka Trump Knows What It Means to Be a Modern Millennial
Then there is The Celebrity Apprentice, which just premiered its fourteenth season.
.. Plus, she says, “we have an unbelievable cast who, as my father says, just hate each other. Which is good!”
.. Donald Trump is virtually synonymous with the modern-day concept of branding.
.. The Apprentice made her famous: a 20-something real estate diva. As she herself points out, “Young professionals don’t usually have pop-culture relevance.” She started getting piles of fan mail from girls who wanted to grow up to be just like her.
.. “So, my husband’s idea of a date night somehow always involves me looking at one of his development sites.” Everyone nods knowingly.
.. And that is when she saw that there was a big hole in the market: No one was designing for the young professional woman who wants clothes with more style than Ann Taylor but not as fashion-disposable as H&M.
.. “We are targeting millennials who aspire to have very big careers, but they are also training for marathons or learning French or starting a family. Every aspect of their life is just as important to them as their careers.”
.. Me and my peers, we’re working really hard at being moms and sisters and professionals. There was a previous generation of women who rose through the ranks in an environment when work and life were highly compartmentalized. And I think now, because of technology, we’re always on.
.. It’s about empowerment and redefining what it means to be a woman in this generation.”
.. XiXi, the nanny, who is Chinese and is teaching the children to speak Mandarin.
.. “His own dreams are bold, and I love that in someone,” says Ivanka, “but he’s incredibly relaxed and calm. The world could be collapsing around him, and nothing fazes him. He’s very solution-oriented. Plus it was nice finding someone who is a genuinely good person.
.. “For me, being so close to work is everything. I get here in three minutes and give them a bath, read to them, and put them to bed, and then I go out almost every night right afterward with Jared.”
.. “I would say she is definitely the CEO of our household, whereas I’m more on the board of directors.
.. Jared’s brother, Joshua, has his own venture-capital firm and was an early investor in Instagram.
.. He is also dating Karlie Kloss
.. This gives some sense of the intersecting worlds that Jared and Ivanka travel in: fashion, finance, media, art, real estate, technology, society
.. In some ways they are the twenty-first-century analog to the It Power Couple that her parents were during the go-go eighties.
.. But I would say Jared and Ivanka are centered in a more low-key, contemporary, family way. I think they don’t need to be as sort of . . . out there in the more outlandish eighties way that my parents were.”
.. Two of the people who are often in those smaller groups are Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. “She’s always aware of everyone around her and ensuring that everyone is enjoying the moment,” says Chelsea. “It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad, and his ability to increase the joy of the room.
.. “There’s not a lot of bullshit in Ivanka’s life. Living through everything that she saw as a kid, she has a very good filter on what’s real, what’s not, what’s worthwhile, and what’s not.
.. movers and shakers
.. with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.”
“Also the ritual for us having Sabbath,” says Jared... “Yeah, we observe the Sabbath,” says Ivanka, sipping her lychee martini. “From Friday to Saturday we don’t do anything but hang out with one another. We don’t make phone calls.”
.. ‘If we’re going to do Shabbos, I’m going to cook.’ She never cooked before in her life, and became a great cook. So for Friday, she’ll make dinner for just the two of us, and we turn our phones off for 25 hours.
.. And for Arabella to know that she has me, undivided, one day a week? We don’t do anything except play with each other, hang out with one another, go on walks together. Pure family.”
.. If I was married to somebody who, even if beneath the surface, didn’t like the fact that I work so hard or didn’t support my ambitions for myself or felt self-conscious about my last name . . . I think it would be very hard to build a solid foundation on that.”
What Does It Mean to Have ‘Repeated Contacts’ With Russian Intelligence?
There is no way to say how many people they have. So some people say that maybe in the central apparatus it’s about maybe 6,000 people. But [counting the regional departments] it might be about 70,000 people. [And] we are talking only about the FSB, but [Russia has] lots of security services—we can also talk about SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service. We can talk about the SBP, which is a presidential security service.
.. If, say, your business involved contacts with so-called state corporations, oil and gas corporations, or big important things for the Russian Federation, your chances are very high. If your business is something about retail or some small or middle-level companies, well it’s not that high.
.. Bob Baer, a former CIA officer, in his book See No Evil. He [recounts how] a contact of his met with Alexander Korzhakov, the chief of the [Russian] President’s Security Service, and Pavel Borodin, chief of the Kremlin’s administration, who offered to help Bill Clinton’s campaign. Baer refused, of course.
The Death of Clintonism
With Hillary Clinton’s loss, Democrats are burying a once-winning way of politics.
She embraced bold approaches on hot-button issues like immigration and gun control that would have been shocking for a Democrat in her husband’s day, and accepted what was arguably the most liberal Democratic Party platform in history, but that never seemed to be enough to satisfy younger voters, especially. “People thought she’d been conceived in Goldman Sachs’ trading desk,” says one veteran Clinton aide, noting the irony that this was millennial voters’ jaded view of a woman often seen in the 1990s as reflexively more liberal than her husband.
.. A Democratic Party that was seen as more sympathetic to criminals than to victims was not a Democratic Party that was going to win elections. Bill Clinton had to correct that, and he did, and by 2015 we just did not have that kind of violent crime any more
.. It is heartbreaking to have so many young people see him not as the guy who shut down the government to save the Great Society from Newt Gingrich
.. Panetta, whose late-career turn toward national security has overshadowed a keen political mind, thinks the surprisingly tough Democratic primary knocked the Clintons off kilter. “They had to deal with Bernie Sanders and the left. They had to make sure they retained that base,
.. She could not, or would not, say aloud what others in her party knew: That Obama had not only largely overlooked the concerns of white working-class voters but, with his health care overhaul, had been seen as punishing them financially to provide new benefits to the poorest Americans. Fairly or not, he lost the public argument.
.. “You didn’t hear a lot of people putting in context that before Bill Clinton, Republicans had controlled the White House for 20 of 24 years, that his last six years in office were with an all-Republican Congress, or that the main reason he got crushed in 1994 was that he was perceived as being too progressive on health care.