Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 10

Legion Is Visually Dazzling, but Little Else

There is an ongoing trend in television toward shows that rely far less on plot than on mood, that are crammed with stunning visuals and frustrating, circular dialogue. These shows often begin with pilot episodes so spectacular you can’t help but jump on board, but then they pad their seasons out as much as possible to keep the central story from moving forward too quickly. Mr. Robot, Westworld, The Young Pope, The OA, The Path, Bloodline, and Sense8 are among the series that have gone this route (some are very interesting, while others aren’t). But the latest, and most indulgent, entrant is FX’s Legion, which takes this more impressionistic approach and applies it to a comic-book show spun off from the X-Men universe.

Legion is David Haller (Dan Stevens), a man with telekinetic and telepathic abilities who was diagnosed as schizophrenic at a young age and has been in and out of institutions ever since. No one in the pilot episode ever says the word “mutant” or “X-Men,” but David was created by comics greats Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz in the pages of 1985’s New Mutants. There, he was introduced as a dangerously unstable anti-hero whose dissociative-identity disorder manifested as different abilities that he’s desperate to learn to control. The TV auteur du jour Noah Hawley, who created the FX series Fargo, has taken this strange character and turned him into something even stranger: the star of a prestige show.

Of course, comic-book heroes have become commonplace in the last 10 years, but FX’s gamble here still feels pretty unusual—even Netflix’s gritty Marvel Universe, featuring heroes like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, has a pulpy, action-packed feel. Not so with Legion, which takes place largely in David’s mind as he tries to sort fantasy from reality, to understand what exactly he can do and which of his friends are real (and which are mental projections). It’s a heady, unusual experience, even by the yardstick of the heady, unusual television of recent years (Mr. Robot is similarly interested in the unreliability of its narrator). But though it’s different enough to deserve audience interest, Legion is too often a tiresome viewing experience.

The pilot episode, which runs over an hour without commercials, sees David being interrogated by a mysterious suit (Hamish Linklater) about an incident at the mental institution he resided in for years. David obviously possesses all kinds of weird powers—mostly the ability to move things around with his mind, usually in spectacular slow-motion—but he seems to be the last person to get the bulletin, not entirely sure if he’s just imagining all the odd things that have happened in his life, and all the shadowy government agencies chasing him.

The set design is striking, and Hawley’s direction even more so: The pilot is rife with elaborately choreographed shots in which not a detail is out of place. It’s truly cinematic stuff that deserves to be taken in on the biggest screen possible (though one of the funniest details of this brave new world of prestige TV is that it’s so often viewed on a laptop). Hawley’s Fargo similarly has a definite visual pop, but its self-contained seasons are tightly woven epic tales of existential dread, unsolved murders, and gangster intrigue, populated by compelling characters. Legion, on the other hand, barely moves its story forward in its first three episodes. Viewers are mostly trapped inside David’s head, trying to unravel mysteries that don’t seem very important while the series talks around the larger questions of how his powers might work, or be applied, once he reaches his full potential.

Is Legion a cinematic tone poem, or a superhero origin story? After three episodes, it was hard to know.

But Legion isn’t sure if it wants to be a show about David’s abilities, or about mental illness. The latter theme is present in all the psych-ward cliches that get dug up. There are the continuous shots of David isolated from everyone around him, as if he’s surrounded by a 20-foot forcefield. There’s his wiseacre friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza), a fast-talking, jittery recovering addict who pals around with David at the institution, and accompanies him (in his memories) on some bizarre misadventures in the real world. And there’s plenty of repetitive dialogue among baffled doctors trying to understand the parameters of David’s illness. Except he’s not exactly ill—he’s gifted, or so Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) tells him, as she moves to seize him from the hands of his interrogators and bring him to his camp for more, let’s say, individualized treatment.

Legion is perhaps more a story of overcoming trauma, as David attempts to parse his memories and past incidents to figure out what drives his powers. But the series is almost afraid to lean into the pulpier side of its comic-book origins, cloaking everything in therapeutic language as Dr. Bird and her protégé Syd (Rachel Keller) help David acclimate to his telekinesis and telepathy. You end up with a visual masterpiece that otherwise feels unsure of its identity—is Legion a cinematic tone poem, or a superhero origin story? After the three episodes provided to critics, it was hard to know.

Still, Stevens (probably best known as the handsome heir of Downton Abbey) is doing fine work at the center of all this, holding the camera’s focus even when Hawley’s dialogue feels like it’s going nowhere. There’s something so fascinating about Legion’s core purpose—taking a troublesome comic-book character and trying to flesh him out in a more artful way—that I will likely stay on board for this eight-episode season, to see if the world around him builds into something more concrete. Legion’s opening episodes, however, might not convince other viewers to do the same, as it tries so hard to dazzle that it forgets to tell a meaningful story.

The Key to Writing a Mystery Is Asking the Perfect Question

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

Doug McLean

When I spoke to John Rechy, the author of After the Blue Hour, for this series, he took me through the first line of Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily”—a stunning sentence in which nothing is wasted, and every word tells a story in itself. The opening is remarkable, Rechy explained, not only for its precision and economy but for the way its central mystery seduces us: What was Miss Emily hiding in her broken-down old house?

The narrative shape of Faulkner’s story—the gossipy inhabitants of a small town gradually uncover a hidden truth—is akin to Rechy’s own writing process. His books tend to begin mysteriously, he explained, with a feeling or image or situation he does not understand but feels compelled to. He discussed how he discovers his characters and story over the course of at least ten start-to-finish drafts—and why, in the end, he feels he’s done his job well if the final result leaves us with more questions than answers.

After the Blue Hour, like “A Rose for Emily,” has a mystery at its core. The young protagonist, a 24-year-old rising literary talent named, fittingly, John Rechy, receives a strange invitation: After reading a few of Rechy’s short stories, an inscrutable, Gatsby-like millionaire invites him to spend the summer on his private island with his mistress and teenage son. It’s a beautiful house with a library of great books, surrounded by ocean, far from home and offered up gratis—but what motivated his host’s invitation, and what will be expected of him in return?

In 1963, Grove Press published Rechy’s debut, City of Night, a frank, lyrical, and autobiographical novel about the encounters of a young male hustler in Los Angeles. The work, which went on to inspire works like The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” and Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, scandalized some reviewers at the time—perhaps most of all because it sold so well. But Rechy didn’t stop there. At 85, he is the author of 16 other books, and includes among his honors PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He spoke to me by phone.

John Rechy: When I was invited to conduct a workshop in creative writing at USC, I was surprised to find that so many students were ruled by literary theories in critical studies. Often, it seemed to me, those approaches tend to separate the author from the reader. I was appalled, for instance, to have a student who had taken a course in James Joyce, but had never read James Joyce.

So I designed a course for writers where we would look at literature closely from a writer’s point of view. We would identify certain effects in the works I chose, and then try to determine how the author may have produced them. I chose a dozen authors we would read from, and I included in my selections William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a favorite story. When I read it again, I realized how spectacular it is—especially the first sentence, one that manages to tell a full story in a single line.  In the course, we went through every word, nothing how each functioned to create a full narrative:

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combination gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.

The first word, “when,” immediately suggests time. It indicates that the story will deal with tensions between the past and present, a kind of metaphoric signal—the way One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with the word “later.” Here, this one word, “when,” casts us into another time, not yet now.

Then we get “Miss” right away, telling us that, whoever this character is, she’s not been married. Next, we get the full name: “Emily Grierson.” From there on, she will be called “Miss Emily”—her unmarried status is forever reflected in the way she is respectfully referred to. Only in the title is she simply “Emily,” the way only the author may address her, the rose being the story itself, a gift from the author to his character.

We quickly get the information that this main character has already “died”—another word with intimations of the past. And then, something wonderful happens. We learn who is speaking in the phrase: “our whole town.” The voice is collective first person, first person plural. Not “I,” but “we” throughout, much like the voice of a chorus in a classical drama. By using the plural first person, Faulkner can avoid the restrictions of single first person and still roam throughout as if with an omniscient point of view—without losing the intimate sense of “our whole town.”

In Faulkner’s books, the words and images assume a certain beauty, like some paintings that we simply experience.

Everyone goes to Miss Emily’s funeral, a ritual not to be missed. Clearly, this lady who died unmarried was of importance to everyone. And yet the town itself is eventually divided, and we see that division here in the first line. The men attend her funeral “through a sort of respectful attention for a fallen monument,” but that “sort of” tells us it’s qualified admiration. And there’s the subtle, metaphoric symbolism of “a fallen monument,” which is thematic—the fall of the South after the Civil War— which Faulkner often lamented, at times too much.

We may infer the prejudices of the time: The women are relegated to a less respectful posture. They come to the funeral not to pay respect, the way the men do, but “out of curiosity.” They want to see the inside of her house. Suspense is introduced. What may be hidden inside?

We learn that no one except “an old man-servant—a combination gardener and cook” had been seen inside Miss Emily’s house in some time. This tells us she was once genteel: She had a garden and a gardener, now serving as both gardener and cook. The lady has fallen on harsh times. Suspense is heightened. No one other than the man-servant has seen the inside of the house for at least ten years. Miss Emily has been not only private, but reclusive, for very long.  

Taken together, this sentence tells a mini-story, full of resonance and metaphor:  A woman from a revered family fell, alone, on bad times, perhaps after the Civil War. She has become a somewhat quaint object of curiosity—the chorus conjectures different fates. She has turned inward, a mysterious recluse.

That opening, to me, is one hell of a sentence.

There are writers who are entirely conscious in how they go about creating. Say, for one example, James Joyce, who battled typographers to retain a single period in Molly’s “soliloquy.” There are other writers who are simply—what?—instinctive geniuses. Wuthering Heights is an example. Emily Bronte’s sister, Charlotte, noted “its immature but very real powers … the power of grandeur.” Yes, its structure is awkward, and its point of view breaks constantly. But the whole is a jewel.

In Faulkner’s books, there are passages  that are undecipherable—but the words and images strung together are so powerful that they assume a certain beauty, like some paintings that we simply experience.  It’s known that sometimes he wrote when he was drunk.  So, then, he was a drunk genius.  In my course at USC, I emphasized that we cannot know the author’s intention, only conjecture. Many “critics” turn great works into Rorschach tests—at times ignoring, say, that Moby Dick is a whale.

An early admirer of my work labeled me “an accidental writer”—the kind who writes randomly, off the stop of his head, the way Kerouac is reputed to have done. But that’s not true of me. I’m a very conscious writer, attentive to the right word, even the lengths of sentences, and punctuation for effect. At times, I want to create an opposite impression, say, a looser prose, but that, too, is done consciously. I’ve never written a book for which I have not gone through at least 10 complete drafts, 10, from page one to the end.

The origin of a book is mysterious, and sometimes you don’t even recognize when it’s born.

The first draft is much less controlled. Through subsequent drafts, I begin to retain a definite structure. In the early drafts, you may locate unexpected signals to yourself; you’re exploring new territory. I’ve drawn maps of the journeys that a character is taking, along a street, say, or a city. I write straight through on a first draft, not reading what I’ve written until I begin the first revision, noting discoveries. One book of mine documents a single day in the life of a Mexican-American woman in Los Angeles. I scouted the territory she would pass through. I saw a shop window displaying a very pretty but somewhat gaudy wedding dress, and that inexpensive wedding dress became central to my character’s motivations. Those discoveries are among the pleasures of revision.

The origin of a book is mysterious, and sometimes you don’t even recognize when it’s born. I didn’t intend to write City of Night. It began as a letter, unsent, then revised, expanded—until there it was: a 500-word novel. At times, I may have observed something and rushed home to write a first draft. My new book, After the Blue Hour, was originally a section of a very long book. Then I saw that one part was separating itself from the others. I plucked it out, and then rewrote, and revised—even the title changed along the way.

I love the process of revising, though it’s sometimes torture in the first round; you even wince, at times, to read what you wrote. At a certain point, a book has taken shape, though. That’s when I want to choose the exact word, the right description, the best chapter endings, even, yes, the right number of syllables for a desired rhythm. What I expect from a writer in my workshops is that they produce their very best—and that’s what I adhere to in my own work, a total dedication to your effect.

Sometimes I’ll find that at the end I haven’t resolved every aspect in the narrative events, or in characterization. Then I may leave things mysterious, unsolved. I wrote one book that has two endings. The English version has one, the American version another. I couldn’t decide what a main character would finally do: A young woman is determined never to cry. In one version—away from everyone else—she does cry. In another, she refuses to cry. I still wonder what she did or not.

I like the element of mystery in literature. Certain things have to be satisfactorily resolved in a narrative, at other times not. In “A Rose for Emily,” we eventually learn what Miss Emily has been clinging to. The clues come together.

There is an apocryphal story about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. (Most of the enduring stories about writers or actors or artists are really not true, and I love that—apocryphal stories are better than some factual ones. They’re stories waiting for their protagonists, and when the right figure or figures appear, the perfect connection is made.) Supposedly, when Gertrude Stein was lying on her deathbed, Alice B. Toklas asked her: “What is the answer?” And Stein answered: “What is the question?” To me, Stein did answer the question. The question is the answer.

That’s what great fiction does, I think: A writer uses narrative to ask a question more clearly than it has ever been asked before. When a question is asked perfectly, it doesn’t need a tidy answer. To discover the precise shape of what the mystery is: That can be enough.

Syria's Secret Mass Executions

At a prison in Syria, thousands of people opposed to President Bashar al-Assad have been executed in secrecy. From the moment detainees arrive they are tortured with strips of tires used to flog their bodies, shocked with electricity, raped, and deprived of food and water.

“In the morning, the guard would come to the wing and ask for the ‘carcasses,’” one former prisoner who went by the pseudonym “Nader,” told Amnesty International in a report released Monday night. “There was one time that nobody died for three days [in our wing], and the guards came to us, room by room, and beat us on the head, chest and neck. Thirteen people from our wing died that day.”

Few people are ever released from this prison 20 miles north of Damascus, and those who do not die of torture or starvation, are sometimes led quietly after midnight to a 25-by-15 foot concrete room. Blindfolded, it is here that Syria’s top officials have overseen the clandestine hangings of between 5,000 and 13,000 people, the report found. Later, their causes of death will be ruled by doctors as respiratory failure—an effort by the Assad regime to create a phony paper trail to legitimize these thousands of executions and hide them from the world.

Saydnaya prison is notorious for being a closely held secret, and until recently little was known about how it operates. Earlier this summer, Amnesty released a separate report on the prison that detailed its living conditions. But these new interviews outline a structured means to kill those opposed to Assad—everyone from factory owners to students and professors. The report shows how Assad’s regime has executed these men in ways deliberate, and highly conscious of how, if exposed, the global community would denounce such acts. Amnesty investigators interviewed 84 people, including former prisoners, guards, judges, and the doctors who signed off on the death certificates of those killed at Saydnaya. These interviews show a human rights crisis that the Syrian government has sanctioned since at least 2011, and which could pose a problem for the new Trump administration.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the U.S. would work “with any country” in order to eradicate ISIS. He has specifically referenced his willingness to work with Russia, and he has already discussed this with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia, meanwhile, has backed the Syrian government in the country’s six-year civil war, saying it shares a common interest in defeating ISIS. Syria has used this same smokescreen as excuse to target civilians with bombs and to arrest dissenters. And, according the Amnesty, the executions inside the Saydnaya prison are authorized by the highest-level officials in the Syrian government, including the Grand Mufti, and either the minister of defense or the chief of staff of the Army, both of whom act on behalf of Assad.

Saydnaya is operated by Syria’s Military Police. It had once housed members of captured militant groups, but in July 2011 the government packed it full of those deemed dangerous to the Assad regime. Since the beginning of the civil war, Syrian soldiers and intelligence officers have raided neighborhoods seen as hostile to the government, rounding up people often on little more than rumor. Some in the prison have found themselves detained for years only because they marched in peaceful protests.

Once they arrive, the guards throw them a “welcome party,” a euphemism that one detainee, a former attorney, described like this:

“You are thrown to the ground and they use different instruments for the beatings: electric cables with exposed copper wire ends...  Also they have created what they call the ‘tank belt,’ which is made out of tire that has been cut into strips... They make a very specific sound; it sounds like a small explosion. I was blindfolded the whole time, but I would try to see somehow. All you see is blood: your own blood, the blood of others.”

Along with the beatings, guards were ordered to torture prisoners psychologically, often by forcing them to rape each other, or by withholding water from detainees so they could not wash away the excrement that had piled up in their cells. Guards also deprived the prisoners of medical care and food. One detainee, who used the pseudonym “Jamal,” told Amnesty: “I remember we were lying down and looking to the ceiling, for hours and hours. There was one piece of ceiling that fell, and one of our cell mates ran to it. He started eating it. He thought it was bread. He had been one of the most refined, educated men in Damascus.”

Most of the prison’s 10,000 to 20,000 detainees were held in a building referred to as the “red building” and also “the Mercedes wheel,” because its three long corridors that spread out from the center gave it the appearance of the Mercedes-Benz logo. The prison’s second structure was called the “white building,” and it was here that the Syrian government hung thousands of people.

Typically on Mondays and Wednesdays the guards forced a few dozen prisoners to line up, telling them they were about to be transferred to civilian prisons. Instead, in the afternoon the guards led the detainees to the basement and beat them until it grew dark outside. At night the men are blindfolded and driven across the prison grounds to the white building. In a room there the prisoners, still blindfolded, lined up before a desk and were told for the first time a court has sentenced them to death. They’re forced to sign a paper with their inked fingerprint, a form that a prison official told Amnesty bares the detainee’s name, mother’s name, prison ID number, and their last wishes. But this last part “was just nonsense,” the official said. “It didn’t really lead to anything or mean anything.”

Without the prisoners ever knowing, this will be one of the last documents bearing their names that are meant to absolve the Syrian government of their execution. In the months before the prisoner is hanged, according to Amnesty, the Syrian government is busy sending paperwork back and forth from military judges to high-ranking government officials. The prisoners already will have appeared before a court, where in a matter of a few minutes they were found guilty, often with the only evidence coming from coerced confessions made while being tortured. Amnesty’s found these convictions are then signed off by either the Syrian Grand Mufti, the minister of defense, or the chief of staff of the Army, who also specify the date of the executions. This has been done twice a week for five years, and it’s likely it’s still continuing, as Saydnaya prison is still in use.

The prisoners are then hung from ropes tied to a metal pipe. The guards pile their bodies into trucks and drive them to nearby hospitals, where doctors are forced to sign off on the deaths as if they were natural. “We are allowed to write only two causes of death,” a doctor who used the pseudonym “Yaman” said, “either ‘the heart stopped’ or ‘the breathing stopped.’”

By the end of the month, officials from Turkey, who will represent Syrian rebel groups,  are scheduled to meet in Geneva for peace talks, hoping to bring an end to the Syrian civil war. There, Assad’s interest will be represented by Russia.

Trump's Baseless Claim That the Media Covers Up Terror Attacks

The Donald Trump who arrived at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa on Monday was subdued and dark, promising to keep the United States against “radical Islamic terror” through a strong defense, and accusing the press of willfully refusing to report on terrorist attacks.

But first, as he is wont to do, Trump let his mind drift back to a happier time, before he was ensconced in the White House with a passel of quarreling advisers, an unrelenting chorus of critics, and a federal judiciary stymieing his agenda.

Related Story

'Alternative Facts': The Needless Lies of the Trump Administration

“We had a wonderful election, didn’t we?” the president said as he began his remarks. “And I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I like you. That’s the way it worked.”

He then introduced Governor Rick Scott, thanking him for his endorsement with a little backhanded threat. “If they don’t endorse, believe me, if you’re ever in this position, it’s never quite the same,” Trump said. “You can talk, but it never means the same.”

That was about as sunny as things got, although Trump has great praise for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, both of which are housed at MacDill. Trump did boast about pressuring Lockheed Martin to knock nine figures off the cost of the F-35, and he took a moment to boost his nominee for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch—though, weirdly, he did not mention Gorsuch’s name.

“Great, great Supreme Court nominee, you all saw that, but I said to myself, Perhaps the only thing more important to me definitely is the defense of our nation. Supreme Court’s so important, but we have to defend our nation, and we will do that, believe me.”

The threat to the U.S. is great, in Trump’s telling.

“The challenges facing our nation nevertheless are very large. Very, very large,” Trump said. “We’re up against an enemy that celebrates death and totally worships destruction. You’ve seen that. ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the word. Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our nation as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe.”

He continued: “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

The last few sentences there are staggering: Trump’s assertion that there are attacks that the press is not reporting, and furthermore is not reporting for political reasons. In fact, the media love reporting on terrorism stories, following the old news adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.” One might argue, in fact, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has, that America already overreacts to terrorist attacks, instilling undue public fear relative to the number of Americans actually killed in terror attacks.

But never mind that: Just what attacks is Trump claiming have not been covered? He did not name any, and a request to the White House for a list was not returned. It’s a safe bet there are not any. Trump might prefer more frequent, or more salacious, coverage of European attacks, but that’s a different complaint.

Then there is the accusation that the press is intentionally covering up, for some nefarious reason that his audience will understand but need not go stated, a classic example of dogwhistle politics. That’s in keeping with his longstanding assault on the press, though when combined with the implication that they are doing so to undermine the nation’s security, it takes on an even darker shade. (Claims of a media coverup of terrorism are a staple of conspiracy-theory outlets like Alex Jones’s Infowars.)

Once again, the nation is left to ask whether Trump’s wild deviation from reality is intentionally misleading or simply sloppy and careless. The natural comparison is to comments last week by senior Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, who claimed that Trump’s immigration executive order would have prevented the “Bowling Green massacre” that was not covered. There was, of course, no such massacre, although the hubbub distracted somewhat from Conway’s other false claim that President Obama had issued a similar six-month moratorium on refugees entering the U.S. from Iraq.

In reality, two Iraqis living in the Kentucky town were arrested for attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and attempting to aid al-Qaeda. In response, the Obama administration reworked its vetting procedures, slowing but never stopping the admission of refugees.

Conway excused her false claim as a simple misstatement. Yet since then, it has emerged that she referred to the fictitious massacre in at least two other interviews, too. At what point does Conway stop getting the benefit of the doubt? (For CNN, that point has apparently already passed: The network says it passed up an offer to interview her on Sunday due to “serious questions about her credibility.”)

Intentionally or not, Conway’s “Bowling Green” fabrication and Trump’s claim of unreported attacks begin to create a pattern. The Trump administration has already asserted blatant lies as truth, then excused them as “alternative facts.” Together these new statements push toward a specific pre-debunking of any media coverage of terrorist attacks, and allowing Trump to push his own counternarrative.

Jack Goldsmith, a former top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, argued that Trump’s attack on “so-called” Judge James Robart is a prelude to blaming the independent judiciary in the event of a deadly attack. If so, then Monday’s claim about the media could been seen as a prelude to scapegoating the press, too.

As if all that were not strange enough, there’s Trump’s choice of venue. Like his speech to the CIA the day after his inauguration, in which he made his controversial assertion that the U.S. “should have kept the oil” after invading Iraq, this speech was made to a military audience. Even General Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was present.

This creates an uncomfortable dynamic, because the armed forces are a captive audience being addressed by their commander-in-chief. That leaves them in an awkward spot—more or less obligated to applaud politely, and never to jeer or grumble at Trump’s strangest comments. Several of the retired generals in Trump’s Cabinet have already found themselves pushing back on his policy moves. One wonders how the brass who are still uniform, like Dunford, feel about being turned into unwitting cheerleaders for the president’s self-aggrandizement and attacks on his political enemies.

Trump's Outrageous Claim That the Media Covers Up Terror Attacks

The Donald Trump who arrived at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa on Monday was subdued and dark, promising to keep the United States against “radical Islamic terror” through a strong defense, and accusing the press of willfully refusing to report on terrorist attacks.

But first, as he is wont to do, Trump let his mind drift back to a happier time, before he was ensconced in the White House with a passel of quarreling advisers, an unrelenting chorus of critics, and a federal judiciary stymieing his agenda.

Related Story

'Alternative Facts': The Needless Lies of the Trump Administration

“We had a wonderful election, didn’t we?” the president said as he began his remarks. “And I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I like you. That’s the way it worked.”

He then introduced Governor Rick Scott, thanking him for his endorsement with a little backhanded threat. “If they don’t endorse, believe me, if you’re ever in this position, it’s never quite the same,” Trump said. “You can talk, but it never means the same.”

That was about as sunny as things got, although Trump has great praise for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, both of which are housed at MacDill. Trump did boast about pressuring Lockheed Martin to knock nine figures off the cost of the F-35, and he took a moment to boost his nominee for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch—though, weirdly, he did not mention Gorsuch’s name.

“Great, great Supreme Court nominee, you all saw that, but I said to myself, Perhaps the only thing more important to me definitely is the defense of our nation. Supreme Court’s so important, but we have to defend our nation, and we will do that, believe me.”

The threat to the U.S. is great, in Trump’s telling.

“The challenges facing our nation nevertheless are very large. Very, very large,” Trump said. “We’re up against an enemy that celebrates death and totally worships destruction. You’ve seen that. ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the word. Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our nation as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe.”

He continued: “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in may cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

The last few sentences there are staggering: Trump’s assertion that there are attacks that the press is not reporting, and furthermore is not reporting for political reasons. In fact, the media love reporting on terrorism stories, following the old news adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.” One might argue, in fact, as my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has, that America already overreacts to terrorist attacks, instilling undue public fear relative to the number of Americans actually killed in terror attacks.

But never mind that: Just what attacks is Trump claiming have not been covered? He did not name any, and a request to the White House for a list was not returned. It’s a safe bet there are not any. Trump might prefer more frequent, or more salacious, coverage of European attacks, but that’s a different complaint.

Then there is the accusation that the press is intentionally covering up, for some nefarious reason that his audience will understand but need not go stated, a classic example of dogwhistle politics. That’s in keeping with his longstanding assault on the press, though when combined with the implication that they are doing so to undermine the nation’s security, it takes on an even darker shade. (Claims of a media coverup of terrorism are a staple of conspiracy-theory outlets like Alex Jones’s Infowars.)

Once again, the nation is left to ask whether Trump’s wild deviation from reality is intentionally misleading or simply sloppy and careless. The natural comparison is to comments last week by senior Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, who claimed that Trump’s immigration executive order would have prevented the “Bowling Green massacre” that was not covered. There was, of course, no such massacre, although the hubbub distracted somewhat from Conway’s other false claim that President Obama had issued a similar six-month moratorium on refugees entering the U.S. from Iraq.

In reality, two Iraqis living in the Kentucky town were arrested for attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and attempting to aid al-Qaeda. In response, the Obama administration reworked its vetting procedures, slowing but never stopping the admission of refugees.

Conway excused her false claim as a simple misstatement. Yet since then, it has emerged that she referred to the fictitious massacre in at least two other interviews, too. At what point does Conway stop getting the benefit of the doubt? (For CNN, that point has apparently already passed: The network says it passed up an offer to interview her on Sunday due to “serious questions about her credibility.”)

Intentionally or not, Conway’s “Bowling Green” fabrication and Trump’s claim of unreported attacks begin to create a pattern. The Trump administration has already asserted blatant lies as truth, then excused them as “alternative facts.” Together these new statements push toward a specific pre-debunking of any media coverage of terrorist attacks, and allowing Trump to push his own counternarrative.

Jack Goldsmith, a former top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, argued that Trump’s attack on “so-called” Judge James Robart is a prelude to blaming the independent judiciary in the event of a deadly attack. If so, then Monday’s claim about the media could been seen as a prelude to scapegoating the press, too.

As if all that were not strange enough, there’s Trump’s choice of venue. Like his speech to the CIA the day after his inauguration, in which he made his controversial assertion that the U.S. “should have kept the oil” after invading Iraq, this speech was made to a military audience. Even General Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was present.

This creates an uncomfortable dynamic, because the armed forces are a captive audience being addressed by their commander-in-chief. That leaves them in an awkward spot—more or less obligated to applaud politely, and never to jeer or grumble at Trump’s strangest comments. Several of the retired generals in Trump’s Cabinet have already found themselves pushing back on his policy moves. One wonders how the brass who are still uniform, like Dunford, feel about being turned into unwitting cheerleaders for the president’s self-aggrandizement and attacks on his political enemies.

Trump's Neocon?

Elliott Abrams is reportedly under consideration to be deputy secretary of state—setting up a strange third act for the longtime Republican foreign-policy figure, and a strange No. 2 for the Trump State Department. Politico’s Michael Crowley reports that Abrams is meeting with President Trump on Tuesday, and that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supports him for the job. Josh Rogin previously reported that Abrams was in the running for the job. Abrams declined to comment for this article.

If selected and confirmed by the Senate, Abrams would occupy a peculiar role: the most prominent neoconservative, and most experienced foreign-policy professional, in an administration that has promised to repudiate nearly everything that neoconservatism stood for, and which has disdained foreign-policy professionals as bumbling fools.

Joining the administration would also require both Abrams and Trump to get over some longstanding differences. Trump is notoriously fond of revenge, and Crowley writes that presidential adviser Steve Bannon is vetting Abrams to see if the White House can get past his past criticisms of the now-president. Abrams advised both the campaigns of both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In March, he told Politico he wasn’t sure whether he could vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton, and in May he wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard likening the election to 1972’s Democratic nomination of George McGovern: “The party has nominated someone who cannot win and should not be president of the United States. We anticipate a landslide defeat, and then a struggle to take the party back from his team and his supporters and win the following presidential election. Meanwhile, we need to figure out how to conduct ourselves.”

Many neoconservatives opposed Trump: As a candidate, he blasted the Iraq war and lied that he had opposed it from the start; called for pulling back from American involvement overseas; and showed little interest in national defense, though he paid lip service to building up the military. But Abrams is not just any neoconservative. He’s a member of one of the movement’s first families. His late wife, Rachel Decter, was the daughter and stepdaughter, respectively, of the neoconservative progenitors Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz. While Norman eventually backed Trump, reluctantly, his son (and Abrams’s brother-in-law) John Podhoretz has remained a vocal Trump critic.

Taking a job as the No. 2 diplomat for a president whom he wouldn’t support as the GOP nominee would be a remarkable third act for Abrams’s career. His first big job came in the Reagan administration, where he was assistant secretary of state, including terms overseeing humanitarian affairs and the inter-American policy. That brought him into the Iran-Contra affair, in which the federal government secretly sold weapons to Iran—in violation of an arms embargo—and then funneled the proceeds to fund the Contras, the right-wing militias opposing Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, also contrary to federal law. The independent counsel investigating the scheme considered charging Abrams with several felonies, but Abrams agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor cases of withholding evidence. He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush in the last days of his administration.

When Bush’s son became president eight years later, he appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, supervising U.S. policy in the Middle East. Abrams was a supporter of the Iraq war and took a lead on Israeli-Palestinian issues. He’s now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for a variety of outlets, including items posted on The Atlantic.

It’s a sign of how much Trump has shifted the center of the foreign-policy discourse that one of Abrams’s signal virtues for the job appears to be that he might be widely acceptable to a range of constituencies. That’s remarkable, given his Iran-Contra record and his time in the Bush administration, the Middle East record of which is, to understate things, contested—not least by Trump.

But bringing Abrams on would help reassure the more hawkish and neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, which has slumped uneasily toward Trump since his election but hasn’t fully embraced him. And it might win over liberals, too, who see in Abrams someone they don’t agree with, but an adult with experience in foreign policy—a commodity that is conspicuously absent in the Trump administration. Tillerson, for example, spent his entire career until this month at ExxonMobil. The suggestion that Tillerson is pushing Abrams is intriguing, given Abrams’s past criticism of Trump and reports of tension between Tillerson and the White House over Trump’s immigration executive order.

Matt Waxman, a former Bush administration State Department official who worked with Abrams and is now a professor at Columbia Law School, signed a letter from GOP national-security experts assailing Trump during the campaign. In an email, he wrote that Abrams could be a strong asset to the administration.

“Secretary Tillerson needs a strong #2 who knows the State Department and the interagency process, as well as the Washington and global diplomacy arenas,” Waxman said. “Elliott is masterful at working the levers in all of them.”

Abrams does have some areas of agreement with Trump. He seems to align with the president, at least in broad strokes, in his approach to Israel; Abrams wrote in support of David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel. He also has pointed to the persecution of Christians around the world, and has written that Western nations should grant refugee status to endangered Christian communities—a position that’s in line with Trump’s own views on the matter. In other areas, they differ. Abrams wrote—too optimistically, in retrospect—in 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s “vicious regime” was likely to fall, while Trump has shown little interest in Assad’s departure, leaning toward the Russian approach of keeping the Syrian president in power nearly six years after the civil war erupted. Abrams has also been critical of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who early on appears to be Trump’s closest friend in the Arab world.

Of course, not everyone would be on board with an Abrams pick. Eric Alterman rips Abrams in The Nation, indicting Abrams not only for Iran-Contra but his role in a grab-bag of other Latin American adventures, as well as his work in the Middle East under Bush. In the right-of-center, intervention-skeptical The National Interest, Daniel DePetris zeroes in on some of the same issues, writing, “Is the neoconservative, unilateral interventionism that Abrams has advocated for throughout his career—and that led directly to the second Iraq War—the kind of foreign-policy doctrine that President Trump wants in his State Department?”

The reported former leading candidate for the deputy secretary’s job was also a neoconservative—John Bolton, who served as ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. But Bolton has always been something of a man apart, a figure too wild-eyed and warlike even by the hawkish standards of the neoconservative movement. According to some theories, it was Bolton’s trademark mustache that torpedoed his chances at the secretary of state’s job, but he also hit a roadblock in the person of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who made clear that neither Bolton nor Rudy Giuliani would earn his confirmation vote because of their advocacy for the Iraq War. Would Abrams clear the bar for Paul? Abrams has criticized Paul in the past, and the Kentucky senator has not commented publicly on the recent reports. A request for comment from Paul’s office was not immediately returned.

As always, it’s impossible to tell whether Trump might move forward on Abrams. He has been known to change his mind mercurially, and the matter of the old slights may still create a barrier. If those can be patched over, however, the men could strike an unexpected deal that would give Trump some credibility with neocons by bringing one of their to the administration, and give Abrams a chance to steer the untutored Trump team toward his own views.

The Super Bowl LI Ads Sold an Escape to the Future

In years past, Super Bowl ads have functioned as a kind of primal scream for America’s inner self, raging against the tyranny of everything from eco-friendly cars to hunger to our gridlocked bowels. They’ve eschewed hope and change in favor of Viagra and a cryogenically frozen Scott Baio, often crystallizing the idea that being great again means going backwards. They’ve assured Americans that Chevy trucks and high-sodium corn chips are the cure for all that ails us.

But this year, things were very different.

Super Bowl LI, coming as it does after one of the most divisive presidential elections in recent memory, was never going to be able to put politics aside. While consumers have become increasingly aware of the stakes of, say, shopping at Nordstrom or requesting an Uber, one of the most notorious pop-cultural figures of the last three decades sits in the Oval Office, having won an election by the same message that Super Bowl ads have previously tended to preach. This year, most brands were savvy enough to realize that a change was necessary. Their 2017 theme, in a nutshell? Escape to the future.

The America being presented in 30-second fragments was basically a utopian paradise, one in which cops and robbers are brought together by Skittles, the glowing cube from the “Hotline Bling” video does your taxes, and Humpty Dumpty isn’t ruined by medical bills. It was the living continuation of #StrongerTogether. It was a warm embrace from globalism, multiculturalism, technological innovation, and Jeffrey Tambor. It was completely divorced from reality, but that wasn’t the point.

Much of the pre-Super Bowl focus had been on Budweiser’s ad and its determinedly pro-immigration message, highlighting how America’s most iconic beer was created by a German immigrant. This, inevitably led to a backlash (#boycottbudwiser is currently trending, #spelling having gone out the same window as #facts), but it portended a number of ads in which corporations seemed to position themselves in opposition to the anti-immigration policies of President Trump. There was this spot for Google Home, accompanied by a whistled rendition of “Country Roads (Take Me Home),” which showcased a number of diverse American households united by their technology.

It was an open-hearted, inclusive vision of America, marred only slightly by the fact that the ad set off Google Home devices all over the country. And its sentiments were echoed in a Coca-Cola ad that aired before the game, which originally ran in 2014 but was timely enough to get a rerun. Unfortunately, “America the Beautiful,” sung in a multitude of languages, by people of all creeds and colors, proved to be just as divisive in 2017 as it was three years ago. (The brands might have their vision of what the country looks like, but not everyone is buying.) Still, Coca-Cola doubled down with a new spot in which their product goes perfectly with a multitude of cuisines, adding togetherness (and high-fructose corn syrup) to the great American melting pot.

But if Coca-Cola’s criticism of a more insular America was implicit, there were a number of companies that weren’t afraid to voice their opposition in more considered terms. Like Airbnb, which directly objected to the president’s travel ban targeting majority-Muslim countries. Over a montage of different faces, superimposed words wrote out a message: “We believe, no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept.”

Then there was the ad aired by the Pennsylvania building materials company 84 Lumber, which bought itself not just a Super Bowl spot but also an unprecedented spike in Google traffic via its ad, whose ending Fox deemed too political to be aired. In the commercial, a mother and daughter embark on a treacherous journey away from home, through rainstorms and over deserts, jumping trains and dodging coyotes. A prompt directed viewers to the URL journey84.com to see the conclusion of the ad, in which the pair are confronted by a huge, seemingly insurmountable wall.

After the little girl waves a flag she’s stitched together from remnants found on her journey, the wall suddenly reveals a door, which allows the pair through, and a message: “The will to succeed is always welcome here.” Again, it was America’s best, most idealistic self on display, and again, it wasn’t entirely popular.

There are plenty who think politics have no place at the Super Bowl, and that ads should stick to their primary purpose of selling things by pretending to be entertainment. For those people, there were a handful of holdouts from bygone days: Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider Mercedes ad, Kristen Schaal’s 50 Shades-inspired T-Mobile spots, and Wix.com’s superhero bonanza starring Jason Statham and Gal Gadot as two people who can’t even go to dinner without nuking the restaurant.

But these were notable exceptions, as many ads sought to offer an out from the reality of the present by looking to the future. In between the action on the field, many of the commercials were a wild and befuddling montage of drones, Transformers, and flying cars. John Malkovich trying to buy his domain name was the sole luddite holdout. Even Doritos, which can typically be relied upon to bring the loudest and most irritating ad of the night, opted out of buying an ad this year, although they popped up in a spot where chips are restocked by Amazon Prime drones.

It wasn’t so much a clash of cultures as a public brawl in which Silicon Valley and America’s favorite beverages fought over which one could more publicly reject a Trumpian vision of America. The heightened political stakes meant that many ads that might have soared in previous years (I’m looking at you, Sexy Mr. Clean, and you, Snickers’s oddly muted live experiment in which Adam Driver wrecked a set) flew under the radar. And in some ways, that’s heartening, since brands mostly won by appealing to America’s better angels rather than, say, our unspoken desire to watch a grotesque puppy/monkey/baby hybrid dance.

The America of the 2017 Super Bowl ads promised, as Comcast Xfinity spelled out, that “the future is awesome.” Even Febreze sought to unite us by pointing out, mostly correctly, that everybody poops the same way. But in a media landscape in which even Morgan Freeman becomes a lightning rod, it’s fair to assume that we’ve got a ways to go.

Lady Gaga Made America Spectacular Again

Lady Gaga made a clear political statement at the halftime show: #resist gravity. Above the NRG Stadium, a drone swarm kicked things off by answering the question of what comes after skywriting. Then Gaga dove from the roof’s ledge, sang while suspended like a marionette, and was carried around by assistants as if she were Prince in a crowd. For the finale she caught a football midair after hopping off a tall staircase. Maybe the ground was meant to symbolize the notion of explicit protest, maybe it stood in for Artpop’s tracklist; in either case, Gaga made a point of avoiding it.

She really is one of our best entertainers, capable of throwing out fistfuls of visual and musical candy while wearing a grin and hitting her marks. The moodboard at Haus of Gaga might have had the words “organic human enthusiasm” and “futuristic tech magic” on it, translating to glitchy-twitchy mass voguing, sea-urchin spikes and scimitar curves, bioluminescent purples and oranges, drones making like a starling murmuration, and Gaga in eyeware resembling Seven of Nine’s. The music mostly reflected her club-conquering early days, though the conservatism of the setlist, all hits and no real curveballs, may reflect wisdom from her more recent misadventures.

Even the most flawless of spectacles, however, must these days be asterisked in the public conversation with the question, What did it have to do with Donald Trump? The most politically contentious moment of an American generation combined with Gaga’s history of unabashed activism had led to pre-game speculation about whether Gaga would aim at the White House, and the truth is that she did make a statement. But it was such a subtle one that Marco Rubio expressed delight that Gaga put on a fun time even “with everything going on” and Ivanka Trump called the show “incredible.”

Hillary Clinton picked up on the subtext, though, tweeting out a gif of Gaga singing “This Land Is Your Land.” That Woody Guthrie tune was one of two patriotic standards that opened the show, the other being Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Neither song is controversial on its face, but their backstories have political charge: Berlin was a Jewish refugee praising his adopted country in a ballad that would eventually soundtrack both the Civil Rights movement and the Trump inauguration; Guthrie was a socialist responding to Berlin’s schmaltz using a communitarian rallying song whose original lyrics dissed capitalists erecting walls. From the margins of American life, both Berlin and Guthrie wrote songs that would eventually be enshrined at its center.

With competence and creativity, acceptance and hope, here’s what American greatness really looks like.

Which is exactly how progress works, as Gaga’s own career attests. Possibly the most explicit LGBT-rights smash of all time, “Born This Way,” got prime placement at halftime; to an audience of millions and Mike Pence in the stands, Gaga sang about the fundamental equality and fabulousness of all races and of “gay, straight, lesbian, transgender life.” Most people probably didn’t even register the politics of that moment as they were swept along by the dancing and pyrotechnics—and that unremarkability is exactly what makes it remarkable. “We’re here to make you feel good,” Gaga announced from the piano during “Million Reasons”; whether you heard that as arena-rock boilerplate or as a salvo for self-care during a difficult time, Gaga was performing pop’s fundamental job on her own inclusive terms.

Around the stage was a moshpit that viewers might have assumed was reserved for contest winners, the luckiest of Gaga’s Little Monsters. But its members turned out to have been choreographed too, swaying in unison while holding light-up torches that made spiffy designs viewable from above. It was a heavily organized vision, but definitively a utopian one. As Gaga sang and keytar-mashed and claw-waved and levitated at the center of it all, a second political message seemed possible: With competence and creativity, planning and professionalism, acceptance and hope, here’s what American greatness can really look like.

The Super Bowl That Felt Like Destiny

The New England Patriots running back LeGarrette Blount managed only 31 yards in Sunday’s Super Bowl, but he excelled as an analyst. As Pats-colored confetti covered the field in the moments following New England’s thrilling 34-28 overtime victory over the Atlanta Falcons, Blount found himself huddled with coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady. He turned to Belichick: “You’re the greatest!” Then he turned to Brady: “And you’re the fucking greatest!” The scores of journalists and talking heads assembled in Houston would spend the next few hours trying, and failing, to match Blount’s clarity.

At the tail end of a blowout-heavy postseason, the 51st Super Bowl—which for a long time looked like another shellacking—turned into an absolute thriller. Midway through the third quarter, the Patriots trailed 28-3; no team had ever dug out of such a large hole in the championship game. Brady looked uncharacteristically shaky, and his counterpart, Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan, had his offense humming. Then, incrementally, things changed. The Atlanta attack stalled, New England started piecing together drives, and the score tightened: 28-9, 28-12, 28-20, and, with a minute left in regulation, 28-28. Four minutes into overtime, running back James White nosed the ball across the goal line, capping the turnaround and setting off the celebration.

For Brady, Belichick, and the Patriots, the game was more than a masterpiece. It was a summary of what has made them, over the course of seven championship appearances and five titles, one of the preeminent teams in sports history. Fifteen years ago, they beat the heavily favored St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl 36, and since then they have cycled through roles—from upstart to juggernaut to hanger-on—and provoked every response from admiration to schadenfreude. The constant in New England has been a kind of football opportunism, a sense that leads are meant to grow, that deficits are meant to dwindle, that advantages should be seized and, yes, rules skirted. When the Patriots are struggling, this looks like pluck; when they’re rolling, it looks like athletic genius. When they do both in the same night, it seems something like destiny.

“Coach talks about, you never know which play it’s going to be in the Super Bowl,” Brady said from the podium rolled out for the postgame trophy ceremony, and indeed, a dozen or more from a broad cast of characters came readily to mind after the final whistle. Midway through the Patriots’ game-tying drive, receiver Julian Edelman dived after a pass tipped and nearly intercepted by Atlanta defenders, wrestling it from a mess of hands and somehow securing it before it hit the turf. Minutes earlier, defensive lineman Trey Flowers had wedged through the Falcons’ front and sacked Ryan, pushing Atlanta out of range of a field goal that would have sealed a victory. A short time before that, New England had flashed some trickery on a two-point conversion; Brady pretended to go after an errant snap as the ball instead went to White, who shouldered his way into the end zone. “If any of [those plays] had been different,” Brady said, “the outcome could’ve been different.”

Tying all this together was the 39-year-old quarterback’s brilliance. The Patriots scored the final five times they had the ball; each of these drives required some magic from Brady. For the last 20 or so minutes of the game, he was nearly perfect, letting go of passes at precise angles and velocities and moments so that they could slip past defenders’ fingertips and settle neatly in their recipients’ arms. He zinged some throws and arced others, spreading the ball from sideline to sideline for 466 yards. When the clock ran low, he hurried his teammates without rushing them, and in overtime he applied a quick-tempo pressure to the reeling Falcons. Following Brady’s lead, the Patriots seemed infused with a growing belief that a win was not only possible but an inevitability.

It was not recitation but total mastery, an awareness of every component of the game.

It has been suggested at times over Brady’s career that his success owes a great deal to his circumstances, playing for Belichick and with well-appointed rosters. This has been couched as a criticism, but Sunday night showed why it shouldn’t be. Ryan, for much of the game, looked like something out of a quarterback instructional video, launching strong-armed throws for huge gains. Leading the comeback, though, Brady looked like nothing so much as a distillation and personification of the New England ethos. He didn’t force the ball downfield but took the 10- and 15-yard gains the defense afforded him. He projected the same calm in the huddle that the stone-faced Belichick does from the sideline. He seemed to read not only coverages but temperaments, sending the ball to players poised for key contributions. It was not recitation but total mastery, an awareness of every component of the game. If Brady couldn’t do that for any other team—work in such detail and with such patience under the sport’s ultimate pressure—his team couldn’t accomplish what it has with any other quarterback.

After the shock of the Patriots’ turnaround wore off, attention turned to the ceremony. The NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had suspended Brady for the season’s first four games in the messy conclusion to what had become known as “Deflategate”: the charge that Brady and the Patriots had softened footballs to afford him better control. In the two-week buildup to the Super Bowl, professional and amateur speculators alike wondered how Goodell’s handing the Lombardi Trophy to the Patriots might play out, given that recent interactions between the franchise and the commissioner had taken the form of media sniping and legal proceedings.

Goodell shook Brady’s hand quickly, then introduced the Patriots owner Robert Kraft while the New England faithful serenaded him with boos. That was the last unhappy sound of the evening; speeches from Kraft, Belichick, Brady, and White (who in true Patriots fashion came from relative anonymity to set a Super Bowl record for receptions) centered on their team’s rare gift for collaboration. Kraft thanked the fans, Belichick thanked his players, Brady thanked his teammates. Superlatives made the rounds; Brady had now won more Super Bowls than any other quarterback, and Belichick more than any other coach.

Player and coach alike, though, both looked a little out of place smiling for the sea of cameras. They’ll be most recognizable, forever, late in a tight game, holding a lead or pursuing one, figuring out some way to nudge the odds in their favor. That’s how we were introduced to them all that time ago, and that’s how we’ll remember them now that they’ve distinguished themselves, a decade and a half later, as the best to ever do their jobs.

The Patriots Win the Super Bowl in an Unprecedented Comeback

It was the greatest comeback of Super Bowl history, and President Donald Trump called it. No team in Super Bowl history had ever recovered from more than 10 points down, but the New England Patriots did, and they beat the Atlanta Falcons in Sunday’s Super Bowl 34 to 28. The Patriots trailed nearly the entire game, and by the second half they were being written off as lost causes, but the Patriots would prove it only counts how you finish.

The game was a matchup of one of the highest-scoring teams, Atlanta, versus one that had allowed the fewest points, New England. The Patriots have been to the Super Bowl more times than any other team in franchise history—nine times, with seven of those since head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady arrived in 2000. For Atlanta, it was their second-ever Super Bowl appearance, and they had never won. But they had dominated through much of the season, and that momentum began with the coin toss.

Former-President George H.W. Bush was pushed onto the field in a wheelchair alongside his his wife, Barbara, who have both have been in-and-out of the hospital lately with health problems. Bush flipped the coin onto the grass, and after a short roll it came up tails—the Falcons had won the toss, deferring their decision to the second half. The game got underway at 6:37 p.m., with the Falcons kicking off to the Patriots.

Before the game started, President Donald Trump predicted the Patriots would win. Trump is close friends with both Belichick and Brady, and he referred to the Falcons only as “ the other team.” In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, who pressed him to make a prediction, Trump said:

“I don’t know even know, what are the odds?” Trump asked. “I guess it’s pretty even. Two great teams. Pretty even. So I’ll say the Patriots will win.”

“By how many points?” O’Reilly asked.

“By eight points,” Trump said.

It would not be by eight points, but against all predictions late in the game, Trump would be right.

The first quarter was mostly uneventful. Neither team scored, and both their defenses foreshadowed a game where punts and special teams would decide victory. Brady had one decent drive in a march down the field, but it was stopped by a poorly executed play-action fake that ended in a sack—something that would become a theme for the first half.

In the second quarter, the Falcons took advantage of a fumble. It started after Brady made a nearly 30-yard pass, and his offense looked to follow that up on the ground. The Patriots handed the ball off to running back LeGarrette Blount, but the ball was knocked loose by Falcons linebacker Deion Jones and in a turn of momentum the Falcons ran the ball back across the field to the red zone. Starting on the the five-yard line, the Falcons scored the first points of the game. They would score twice more that quarter, with the Patriots’ only points coming from a field goal. It was a first half marked by defensive plays, with the Falcons taking advantage of turnovers, and the Patriots looking sluggish. By the end, the score was 21 to 3 for the Falcons.

Lady Gaga soloed the halftime show—a departure of recent, as these have become parades of super stars trying to upstage each other. Her set began with a mash-up of God Bless America and This Land is Your Land—a Woody Guthrie song that could be seen as a Trump dig, were it not always hamstrung to its first few uncontextualized patriotic verses. Gaga ended by singing some lines from the Pledge of Allegiance, then jumped off the stadium’s roof, suspended by wires, onto a tower. Despite the patriotic beginning, the show was mostly a pyrotechnic display that ended with a stripped-down version of her song Million Reasons, and ended with her running up a staircase, tossing the mic, then plunging downward off-screen.

The second half was a different game. New England is known to have slow start, especially in Super Bowls, and it was the third quarter when they first reached the end zone. Brady threw a five-yard pass to running back James White, which put the score at 28 to 9, with a little more than two minutes left in the third quarter.

Brady would end up completing 43 of 62 passes, all for a total of 466 yards and two touchdowns. His performance saved the Patriots, with the prize catch coming from wide receiver Julian Edelman. It was the fourth quarter, the Patriots trailed by one touch down, and the ball bounced off a defender’s hands, off Edelman’s hands, onto another defender’s foot, and somehow Edelman snatched it before it hit the grass. The play was challenged, but the referees ruled it a complete pass. It was arguably the most important play of the game, because after the Patriots scored on the drive, it sent the game into overtime—the first that’s happened in = Super Bowl history.

The Patriot’s got the ball first, marched down the field and scored the winning touchdown on a two-yard run, ending the game with a 34 to 28 win. Not only was this first overtime in Super Bowl history, but Brady also became the first quarterback in N.F.L. to win five Super Bowls.

Trump had watched the game from his golf club in Florida, and reportedly left his Super Bowl party early in the third quarter, while his team, the Patriots, were still losing. After they’d won, he tweeted:

What an amazing comeback and win by the Patriots. Tom Brady, Bob Kraft and Coach B are total winners. Wow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017