Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Trump Built the Wall, Around Himself
President Donald Trump is trapped inside the White House, as a tall and imposing wall is erected around him, and prison guards stand watch.The fencing is intended to keep other people out, of course, and to provide security for the White House. But walls don’t just keep people out—they keep people in, too, a reality dramatized by the fact...
History Will Judge the Complicit
On a cold March afternoon in 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard slipped out of the East German Communist Party Secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother. “My article will be finished this evening,” he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in...
The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump
“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him—the memory of my dead wife—and perverted it for perceived political gain.”There may be a more damning thing that’s been said about an American president, but none immediately comes to mind.This...
Did Trump Really Take Hydroxychloroquine?
President Donald Trump began his week with a staggering admission. Seemingly off the cuff, he announced that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine.What followed was a public debate strange even by present standards. Was the president telling the truth, or was he lying, in a sly provocation, to annoy reporters who have fetishized his recurring...
Trump Is Brazenly Interfering With the 2020 Election
Imagine that the White House chief of staff wrote a secret memo, at the behest of the president of the United States, to the Treasury secretary and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In the carefully hidden memo, the chief of staff directs the two to secretly and illegally cut off all federal funding to two key swing states,...
Trump Is Attacking the Final Safeguard Against Executive Abuses
President Donald Trump’s Friday-night firing of Steve Linick, the inspector general for the State Department, is more than a scandal about alleged abuse of office by Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state—though it is that.It’s more than a scandal about the Trump administration’s decimation of the inspector-general corps, with four...
How to Destroy the Balance of Powers
In 1922, the United States Senate launched an investigation into what would become the most infamous story of executive-branch corruption in American history until Watergate. Teapot Dome, as the scandal came to be known, involved secret deals given out by Warren Harding’s administration for access to oil reserves in Wyoming and California....
Why No One Is Calling on Trump to Resign
In late March, The Boston Globe published an editorial excoriating President Donald Trump over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It said that Trump was “epically outmatched” by the public-health emergency and that his “callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass” had plunged the country into disaster. Trump, the Globe declared in its...
The Secrets Flynn Lied About to Conceal
Russian intelligence services intervened in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Donald Trump. They intervened in ways that were illegal, and they intervened in ways that were clandestine. In the context of an election decided by 80,000 votes in three states, they intervened in ways that probably were decisive. Altogether, the Russian action to...
The Trumpist Right Just Cannot Let Go of the Russia Investigation
It’s been a busy week for Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who in February 2017 resigned from President Donald Trump’s White House after less than a month in his role. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United...
