National Editor, The Atlantic. Author of **My Age of Anxiety** and **Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver**. Retweets can mean everything or nothing.
I love
@TheAtlantic
's copydesk.
"Obscenities, profanities, and vulgarities: Don’t use them gratuitously, but when they’re called for, spell them out instead of abbreviating with a dash or asterisks or obliquely referring to them. We’re not the fucking New York Times."
The implications of what Dr Conley said, and didn’t say, are:
1. Trump received supplemental oxygen at the White House
2. He had a preliminary positive test before going to Bedminster.
3. He got monoclonal antibody treatment on Thursday night
"I Believe Trump Is a Racist"
Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, publicly calls out the president for bigotry.
"Trump is getting away with more, and receiving less scrutiny, than Biden is. If it is true that he’s getting that pass because the media presume he is an underdog, they are playing a risky game."
Pompeo's "presumption of secrecy, and of his ability to upbraid a reporter without her telling the world about his indiscretion, is yet another instance of incompetence and arrogance, mixed together."
"There are two kinds of people in politics: those who think DeSantis is a viable national candidate, and those who have met Ron DeSantis.”
-From
@davidfrum
's piece on a "man radically and pathetically unready for national leadership."
"May’s declining cases are the result of April’s physical distancing, and the consequences of May’s reopenings won’t be felt until June at the earliest. This long gap between actions and their consequences makes it easy to learn the wrong lessons."
Trump "relies on everybody around him being too dazed, too psychologically weak, to resist him and uphold even the most basic legality and decency. So far, he’s gambled right. It’s time—way past time—to prove him wrong."
Trump "is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close?"
"We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life."
In the annals of unlikely characters on whom the hinge of history turns, spare a thought for Anthony Weiner, without whose wayward sexual predilections the FBI's Hillary email investigation would never have been re-opened. But for him, Donald Trump would not have been president.
"Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.That they are defending a person who is fundamentally malicious... is too painful for them to admit."
"If the choice really is between constitutional democracy on the one hand, and free enterprise and national identity on the other, that’s indeed agonizing.
But...that choice is as phony as Bill Barr’s pretense of integrity."
My son's English teacher sent home this haiku he wrote, as evidence of his smartassery:
I don't like haiku.
No clue what to say.
Because I find poems dumb.
And yet I just wrote one.
"That an athlete of his fame is using his platform in such a destructive fashion is bad enough; even more despicable is that Djokovic seems so comfortable exploiting his immense privilege to endanger the health and safety of others."
"A significant portion of Trump’s Republican supporters are open about their belief in his infallibility: 42 percent of Republicans said there is virtually nothing the president could do to lose their approval."
"Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man."
"Dad told us the only reason to hold a gun was to use it, and the only reason to point it at someone was to kill them...They never took photos with their guns. They came from an older world, before guns became props in a culture war with real casualties"
"Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them."
"If you are unwilling to accept one-in-7 million odds of death, you should be unwilling to drive six miles to the vaccination site. Forget other thrill-seeking activities, such as eating mixed nuts without an EpiPen nearby, or going for a bike ride."
A former high-ranking Pentagon official told me recently that he could sleep at night despite Trump craziness--as long as Mattis was running the Defense Department. Without Mattis, he worried, protection against bad decisions might have to be officers willing to disobey orders
"You must sleep some time between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion by people have have no imagination."
--Winston Churchill
“What frightened me in [Trump's] first couple of years was his ignorance,” says Watergate-era White House Counsel John Dean. “What frightens me now is he is learning how things work and how they can be abused.”
"Donald Trump is a genius-level propaganda operative... This is the first time America has ever been exposed to Russian-style disinformation on a massive scale from a domestic actor."
This is a powerful and important piece, by former NYT editorial page editor (and my former Atlantic boss) James Bennet. I encourage everyone--even those predisposed to disagree with what they think he will say--to read it.
"If Trump actually did shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, as he once famously joked, it’s possible that his approval ratings wouldn’t budge at all." A psychologist explains the strange persistence of Trump's narcissistic appeal.
"The president is still a coward...A man who has spent his life avoiding situations that would demand physical courage, and despising those who have it, will be at his most cowardly in a moment like this."
"This is a moment of extreme national cowardice. America’s governing institutions are abdicating their authority in pursuit of expedience and amid a craven scramble to save face."
When two of the smartest & wisest people I know disagree, as
@YAppelbaum
and
@davidfrum
do on impeachment, it stretches my brain.
Yoni says impeach:
David says don't :
George Packer's new piece is the most complete and convincing explanation I've read of how America arrived in its current state of disunity. Hofstadterian/Lippmanesque in its depth
What's it like to serve a commander-in-chief who is impulsive, erratic, disdains expertise, and has no understanding of the military? Mark Bowden asked top generals what they really think about Trump. Their answer: It's worse than you think.
If Joan Didion and Nora Ephron had somehow produced a baby together who grew up to write a piece about timeshares, that baby would be Caitlin Flanagan (
@CaitlinPacific
) and that piece would be this one and it will bring you great joy.
"Many Trump supporters... don’t care how little gets accomplished, so long as that little is done in the most offensive manner possible."
-
@davidfrum
on the GOP's refusal to take yes for an answer.
"Anyone who actually cares about academic freedom, or the future of objective reporting, or the ideas behind the statues built to honor American democrats in the country’s public squares, must hope that Trump loses."
"We now have a Coulter corollary, descended perhaps from Iago and Lady Macbeth. It is: 'Give me a man who is weak enough, and I can taunt him into anything.'"
@JamesFallows
on how Ann Coulter & co goaded Trump into the shutdown.
"Simply put, it’s not about Ukraine. It’s about you. A key reason why the new right hates Zelensky is that the new right hates you. You are the real enemy, and anything or anyone you like, they will hate."
"Imagine Trump’s words coming from the mouth of President Biden, and then imagine the Democratic Party allowing Biden to continue to run for president."
"In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump."
"During the Civil War, the Confederate Army never reached the Capitol....Two days ago, a man walked through the halls of government bearing the flag of a group of people who had seceded from the United States and gone to war against it."
"I do think the president is compromised, that he is unable to put the interests of our nation first, that he acts from hidden motives, because there is leverage over him, held specifically by the Russians but potentially others as well."
"The president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it. This is a particularly dangerous combination, and makes it much more than just typical Trumpian bluster or norm shattering"
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other. --Ulysses S. Grant,Sep 1875
"Democracy depends on the consent of the losers."
"How America Ends," by
@YAppelbaum
, which we published over a year ago, was (depressingly) prescient.
"Hear me, Republicans, when I say that many on the American right are growing more and more comfortable with violence as an instrument of politics, as a means to achieve their goals, as a way to defeat their perceived enemies."
"Those who wish to avoid being force-fed their own testicles should probably not read too much into the kinder, gentler Taliban initiatives currently being implemented in Kabul."
Romney: “I had Professor Dershowitz for criminal law in law school,” Romney said, “and he was known to occasionally take his argument to its illogical conclusion.”
"Trump poses a danger each day he remains in office, wrapped in solipsistic self-pity, heedless of the damage he inflicts on his supporters, and on the country." IMPEACH HIM AGAIN. NOW.
"Teach Americans to despise their collective past, and their future will hold only a struggle for power, pitting group against group, without rules or restraints."
“So I’m weird because I’m 30 and live with my parents, but you’re normal because you’re 30 and live with your wife and kids? You still live with your family, loser.”
"The fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made."
"The clash that is coming will matter to all of us, in ways that we can’t yet fathom. In the centuries-long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line—and our front line too."
"Until the GOP recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk. Each... election will feel like a national emergency. Therefore, the de-radicalization of the GOP is a central task for the next decade."
"Trump doesn’t merely lack ideals—he is incapable of seeing what an ideal is. He has shown us that suspicion is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume that others are untrustworthy, then you will behave in ways that make you yourself repellent."
"The GOP now exists to further the personal desires and wealth of one man.... It is no longer a party of ideas, but a party of idolaters. It is a dark mirror of the authoritarian regimes we once fought."
In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois launched a kids' magazine whose goals included "to make colored children realize that being 'colored' is a normal, beautiful thing" and "to teach them delicately a code of honor and actions in their relations with white children."
"Four years of Trump is an emergency. Eight years is a permanent condition." George Packer's epic account of the president's war on American institutions.
Aung Sang Suu Kyi was an international icon of human rights, a Nobel Peace-prize winner, a beacon of liberal democracy. Now she serves a government committing genocide. What happened?
"I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ."