Trumpism
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Inside the Nunes/ Bannon Mind
Devin Nunes, after a couple of weeks of promoting Russian disinformation about Ukraine, said the other day that 90% of the media is corrupt. Does he really believe it? It wouldn't surprise me if he does. He seems egregiously incapable of acknowledging facts that don't fit his preconceptions, and if the media mostly presents facts
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Impeachment Thoughts
there’s a broader story that’s still murky, because in this scandal Trump is both the perpetrator and the mark. Trump used the power of his office to try to force Ukraine to substantiate conspiracy theories. But the president was fed those conspiracy theories by people with their own agendas, who surely understood that he is
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Why the ‘quid pro quo’ Matters
If I hear another talking head say that the 'quid pro quo' doesn't really matter, that the only thing that matters is Trump's asking a foreign leader to support his political interests, I'm likely to . . . whatever. The 'quid pro quo' matters, and it matters critically. What doesn't matter is that Trump has
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Will Reality Catch Up with Trump?
I was having a conversation with a friend about the NYT podcast earlier this week about Trump's abusive relationship with Deutsche Bank. It's perfectly emblematic of Trump's m.o. My friend was arguing that we underestimate Trump's genius when it comes to the way he does business, and I retorted that he's a genius when it
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The Mueller/Barr Report
So like everyone else, I’ve been obsessing about what is going on with the Mueller report. This column by David Leonhardt comes close (with a few interspersed objections) to my own take on this. Here are the last three paragraphs: Barr’s summary doesn’t answer why Russia went to such lengths to help Trump win, writes The Atlantic’s David
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Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy
I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political
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Cultures of Corruption
In a culture of corruption, like the ones that infected companies like Enron and continue to infect much of Wall Street and the political class in places like Washington, D.C., nobody really believes corruption is wrong. It's accepted simply as how things work, and so if you work in places like that, and you haven't
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The Opioid Crisis
From Axios on Saturday: In 2015, white people among the 15 to 64 age group accounted for 80.2% of all opioid-related deaths, higher than their 61.9% share of the population. Native American people were the only other racial group with a higher share of deaths (1.1%) than their share of the population (0.9%). Black people
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Edsall on White Identity
In this morning’s NYT. Key grafs: In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, a psychology professor at St. Olaf College, found that many whites identified with their race, but “white racial identity is not politically salient.” Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what
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HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality
In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one