Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 13

Trump Ups the Drama for His Supreme Court Pick

All that’s missing is a rose ceremony right out of The Bachelor—a disappointing oversight for a president who was a reality-TV star and has a Rose Garden at his disposal.

Donald Trump plans to announce his first selection for the Supreme Court Tuesday night, offering the announcement at 8 p.m., in the middle of prime time. That’s a departure from the standard procedure in recent years, in which presidents have unveiled their nominees during the middle of the work day. But it’s not the only unusual element of the process. CNN reports that Trump has asked the top two contenders for the post, federal Judges Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, to come for Washington for the occasion, adding to the drama of the event.

So far, most reporting seems to suggest that Gorsuch will be the pick. A Colorodan, Gorsuch sits on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court, a post to which he was appointed by George W. Bush in 2006. He worked as a law clerk to Judge David Sentelle, a respected conservative member of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, and to Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch, who is 49, brings a typically polished, elite resume to the job (Columbia undergrad, Harvard law degree, and a trip to Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship), and legal conservatives view him as a fitting intellectual heir to Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death opened up a slot on the court.

But Hardiman is reportedly not out of the running. A member of the Third U.S. Circuit Court, sitting in Pittsburgh, Hardiman, age 51, was nominated to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2003, and elevated to the appeals court four years later. The first member of his family to graduate from college, Hardiman attended Notre Dame and then got his law degree from Georgetown. But some conservatives are dubious about Hardiman. While his rulings have been largely conservative, some observers worry about his fidelity to ideology—in part because he has the backing of Maryanne Trump Barry, a colleague on the Third Circuit who was nominated by Bill Clinton, and just happens to be the president’s sister. Hardiman’s conservative skeptics see in him the threat of becoming like David Souter, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by George H.W. Bush but ended up with a very moderate record on the Court.

Both judges have strongly defended the Second Amendment from the bench, and it’s expected that both would be unfriendly toward abortion rights.

A third hopeful, Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, seems to have fallen out of contention. But with Trump, no thing is certain. He seems to take special enjoyment in the drama of jilting suitors. During the presidential campaign, Trump seemed so set on Mike Pence as his vice-presidential candidate that many outlets reported it as a done deal. Soon, reliable reports emerged that Pence had not been chosen. Then Trump waited for a few hours before finally confirming the Pence pick. (The New York Post later reported that Trump had picked Pence, then changed his mind and decided he wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, only to have his advisers convince him to stick with Pence.)

More recently, Trump aides strongly telegraphed that Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington would be his nominee for secretary of the interior, but Trump then changed his mind and offered the job to Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana.

In other words, any prospective nominee should wait to pop the champagne until he hears President Trump make the announcement publicly. That’s just one more way to augment the drama of the pick. The president previously said he would announce his nominee on Thursday, but after the widespread backlash over the weekend to his executive order on immigration, Trump announced he would unveil his selection Tuesday evening instead. That move seemed calculated to change the subject away from the unpopular order and to argue to conservatives that they are best off sticking with him, despite his liabilities, because of the importance of appointing conservative jurists to the Supreme Court.

All of the speculation will come to a head this evening with Trump’s announcement, which the White House is advertising like a major TV finale. Perhaps the most salient difference is that unlike the fired runners-up on The Apprentice, the losing contestant in this showdown will still have a lifetime appointment to the federal judge.

Trump Dials Up the Drama for His Supreme Court Pick

All that’s missing is a rose ceremony right out of The Bachelor—a disappointing oversight for a president who was a reality-TV star and has a Rose Garden at his disposal.

Donald Trump plans to announce his first selection for the Supreme Court Tuesday night, offering the announcement at 8 p.m., in the middle of prime time. That’s a departure from the standard procedure in recent years, in which presidents have unveiled their nominees during the middle of the work day. But it’s not the only unusual element of the process. CNN reports that Trump has asked the top two contenders for the post, federal Judges Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, to come for Washington for the occasion, adding to the drama of the event.

So far, most reporting seems to suggest that Gorsuch will be the pick. A Colorodan, Gorsuch sits on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court, a post to which he was appointed by George W. Bush in 2006. He worked as a law clerk to Judge David Sentelle, a respected conservative member of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, and to Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch, who is 49, brings a typically polished, elite resume to the job (Columbia undergrad, Harvard law degree, and a trip to Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship), and legal conservatives view him as a fitting intellectual heir to Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death opened up a slot on the court.

But Hardiman is reportedly not out of the running. A member of the Third U.S. Circuit Court, sitting in Pittsburgh, Hardiman, age 51, was nominated to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2003, and elevated to the appeals court four years later. The first member of his family to graduate from college, Hardiman attended Notre Dame and then got his law degree from Georgetown. But some conservatives are dubious about Hardiman. While his rulings have been largely conservative, some observers worry about his fidelity to ideology—in part because he has the backing of Maryanne Trump Barry, a colleague on the Third Circuit who was nominated by Bill Clinton, and just happens to be the president’s sister. Hardiman’s conservative skeptics see in him the threat of becoming like David Souter, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by George H.W. Bush but ended up with a very moderate record on the Court.

Both judges have strongly defended the Second Amendment from the bench, and it’s expected that both would be unfriendly toward abortion rights.

A third hopeful, Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, seems to have fallen out of contention. But with Trump, no thing is certain. He seems to take special enjoyment in the drama of jilting suitors. During the presidential campaign, Trump seemed so set on Mike Pence as his vice-presidential candidate that many outlets reported it as a done deal. Soon, reliable reports emerged that Pence had not been chosen. Then Trump waited for a few hours before finally confirming the Pence pick. (The New York Post later reported that Trump had picked Pence, then changed his mind and decided he wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, only to have his advisers convince him to stick with Pence.)

More recently, Trump aides strongly telegraphed that Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington would be his nominee for secretary of the interior, but Trump then changed his mind and offered the job to Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana.

In other words, any prospective nominee should wait to pop the champagne until he hears President Trump make the announcement publicly. That’s just one more way to augment the drama of the pick. The president previously said he would announce his nominee on Thursday, but after the widespread backlash over the weekend to his executive order on immigration, Trump announced he would unveil his selection Tuesday evening instead. That move seemed calculated to change the subject away from the unpopular order and to argue to conservatives that they are best off sticking with him, despite his liabilities, because of the importance of appointing conservative jurists to the Supreme Court.

All of the speculation will come to a head this evening with Trump’s announcement, which the White House is advertising like a major TV finale. Perhaps the most salient difference is that unlike the fired runners-up on The Apprentice, the losing contestant in this showdown will still have a lifetime appointment to the federal judge.

Superstars May Be Rebelling Against the Grammys

Frank Ocean made what’s widely considered one of the best albums of last year, but he won’t be at the ceremony meant to recognize the best in music—the Grammys. This is by choice: He didn’t submit Blond(e) for consideration. In November, he told The New York Times that the Recording Academy “doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from,” noting that black artists have rarely won Album of the Year. He added that sitting the awards out would be his “Colin Kaepernick moment,” a reference to the San Francisco 49ers player who took a knee during the National Anthem to protest America’s racist history.

Ocean’s decision to boycott signaled wider discontent with the Grammys, and it may have even started a chain reaction of pop-star protest. TMZ reports that Drake, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber may all also skip the awards show because it’s “irrelevant.” While the news hasn’t been confirmed elsewhere, it would fit a general trend of artists rebelling against their industries’ gatekeepers in what might be the most effective way possible: by withholding their star power.

West has a long and infamous history of sparring with the Grammys—even as he racked up 21 trophies from them over the years. The most famous example came in 2015 when West hopped onstage as Beck’s folksy Morning Phase won the Album of the Year prize over Beyonce’s self-titled tour de force. For him and many others, Beck’s win embodied the great Grammy hypocrisy: It profits from boundary-pushing popular black artists by having them at the ceremony, but tends to reserve its top awards for more musically conservative white artists.

While many saw the moment as another example of West’s vanity, really he’d been expressing solidarity for a cause bigger than himself.  On Twitter, he argued that the hip-hop presence at the Grammys should be more than “just me and Jay in a suit,” citing Future and Young Thug—rappers who are vital with young and black crowds—as examples of who’s getting left out. Later on tour, he announced he wouldn’t show up at the 2017 ceremony unless Ocean was nominated. His call to make the Grammys “culturally relevant again” got the attention of Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, but it’s unlikely that West is thrilled by the nomination class for the Feb. 12 ceremony: No Future, no Young Thug, no Ocean, and West’s The Life of Pablo left out of the album of the year category. (He was nominated a number of times, but only in the rap categories—as has been typical for him and many other emcees over the years.)

Drake and Justin Bieber did make the cut for album of the year consideration, though, which means that the threat of them spurning the Grammys could be more consequential than West’s. Neither is a particularly political pop star; if they’re skipping the ceremony, it’s possibly a marketing consideration—a distressing one for the Recording Academy. TMZ’s sources say Bieber “doesn’t think the Grammys are relevant or representative, especially when it comes to young singers.” The sentiment might come from personal experience: Despite enormous popularity for more than half a decade, Bieber had only been nominated three times prior to 2017.

The academy’s strained relationship with hip-hop has hurt its cultural cachet.

He, of course, cannot claim racism for that. But he may have an intuitive understanding of how the academy’s strained relationship with hip-hop—a genre Bieber loves—has hurt its cultural cachet. Drake, arguably the most influential pop figure this decade, has been nominated 27 times but only won once. He’s mostly kept mum about his opinion of the Recording Academy, though he did once memorably use one of his trophies as a chalice. And one song on his Album of the Year nominee Views features a Grammy-less Future rapping a chorus that goes “They gon’ think I won a Grammy”—a statement implying the academy’s judgement is out of sync with the wider public’s.

The conversation over the Grammys hasn’t quite as explicitly centered on questions of representation and racial justice as, say, recent Academy Awards controversies have. And the show still has the power to generate memorable TV moments (see Kendrick Lamar at last year’s ceremony), honor vital young artists (Chance the Rapper’s nomination this time is historic), and attract an array of talent (Anderson .Paak, Maren Morris, Metallica, Adele, Daft Punk, The Weeknd, and A Tribe Called Quest are among the featured performers this year). But if major stars bow out due to aesthetic objections, it’ll be a reminder that relevance and inclusivity often amount to the same thing—awards that don’t reflect the culture won’t be respected by the culture.

Are Trump's Generals Mounting a Defense of Democratic Institutions?

Just a few weeks ago, progressives were aghast at the number of retired generals Donald Trump was naming to top positions in his administration, worried they were a sign of a nascent military dictatorship. Less than two weeks into his presidency, the generals seem to provide one of the few constraints on Trump’s moves.

After considering retired top brass for several openings, Trump ultimately hired three generals in top-level roles: Michael Flynn as national security adviser, John Kelly as secretary of homeland security, and James Mattis as secretary of defense. Trump’s administration has gotten off to a surprisingly effective start, remaking American policy on a range of issues with blitzkrieg efficiency. Democrats, a beleaguered minority, have little means to slow the White House down. With some notable exceptions, most Republicans in Congress are unwilling or unable to mount any serious opposition to Trump’s policies, both because they have other areas where they hope to work with Trump and also because the White House is reportedly drafting congressional staffers into service without their bosses’s knowledge.

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All the President-Elect's Generals

That leaves few people in a better position to push back than Trump’s generals. They’re within the administration, and they were chosen in part to give the president some credibility: Their military experience made them respectable, and imparted competence that Trump needed to borrow. And while Trump’s critics worried that they would either lean toward an authoritarian model or else follow commands in the military manner, a series of reports suggests that they’re already frustrated with the president and feuding with his aides.

The immigration executive order, issued last week, has created the perfect conditions for a blow-up. The order sowed chaos around the country over the weekend, as the federal government struggled to implement a directive that had not been run past relevant agencies and offered a range of areas for disagreement. Trump signed the order on Friday at a ceremony for Mattis’s installation at the Pentagon, and the retired Marine general looked on as Trump put pen to paper. It’s Kelly at DHS who is charged with implementing much of the order. But it appears that neither man was fully briefed on the order ahead of time, nor did they have any input in the drafting, which was run out of the West Wing.

Kelly is frustrated about how the order was issued, The Wall Street Journal reports, saying that the secretary, a former Marine general, had been pressing the White House for language on the order for days, but only learned of the specifics while traveling to Washington on Friday. The New York Times reports that Kelly was finally getting a briefing as he traveled: “Halfway into the briefing, someone on the call looked up at a television in his office. ‘The president is signing the executive order that we’re discussing,’ the official said, stunned.”

Kelly was not the only person left out of the loop, the Associated Press reports:

At least three top national security officials—Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, who is awaiting confirmation to lead the State Department—have told associates they were not aware of details of the directive until around the time Trump signed it. Leading intelligence officials were also left largely in the dark, according to U.S. officials.

According to the AP, neither Mattis nor General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew about the details. Tillerson, who if confirmed will become the nation’s top foreign-affairs official “has told the president's political advisers that he was baffled” that he was shut out, the AP said. Mattis was previously critical of the idea of a Muslim ban.

Trump defended the tight control of information in a tweet Monday:

If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the "bad" would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad "dudes" out there!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017

One is left to wonder whether the president believes that his Cabinet secretaries are among the “bad ‘dudes.’” Yet the pace of leaks does suggest that if Trump had informed departments of the order ahead of time, the language would have made it to the public, and perhaps forced the White House to delay or soften the order.

The immigration order is only the latest matter to cause friction between Trump and the ex-brass, much of it following the same template—frustration over lack of communication and a sense that the White House demands its way over the objections of department staffers.

The Journal also reports that Kelly was upset at the White House for pushing Kris Kobach for the role of his deputy. Kobach, who is the Kansas secretary of state, is an outspoken immigration hawk and proponent of strict voter laws as a response to discredited allegations of massive voter fraud. Kobach was reportedly the West Wing’s choice to be Kelly’s deputy, but Kelly refused, desiring a candidate with more homeland-security experience. Elaine Duke, a longtime DHS administrator, is in line for the job.

Mattis has also reportedly clashed with the White House over appointments. The Trump team nominated businessman Vincent Viola to be secretary of the Army without first consulting the defense secretary-designate, who had not yet been confirmed at the time. CNN and The Washington Post both reported on conflicts, though the Trump transition denied any friction. While Trump has repeatedly suggested he would bring back the use of torture, Mattis has insisted that such tactics are immoral and counterproductive.

Other reports suggest that Trump is also displeased with Flynn, though for different reasons. Flynn is by most accounts a brilliant intelligence officer with some managerial weaknesses, and he was a leading Trump supporter during the campaign. The Times reports:

But Mr. Flynn, a lifelong Democrat sacked as head of the Pentagon’s intelligence arm after clashing with Obama administration officials in 2014, has gotten on the nerves of Mr. Trump and other administration officials because of his sometimes overbearing demeanor, and has further diminished his internal standing by presiding over a chaotic and opaque N.S.C. transition process that prioritized the hiring of military officials over civilian experts recommended to him by his own team.

Flynn was reported to be a player in the split between Mattis and the White House.

When Mattis and Kelly were nominated to head departments—Flynn, as national security adviser, did not require Senate confirmation—some progressives worried that the generals would either be too willing to acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, unlike career civilian officials, or that the heavy presence of brass would undermine the cherished civilian control that is a hallmark of the United States government. Mattis required a waiver to run the Pentagon because he had not been out of uniform for the decade typically required before a former officer can serve in a top civilian role, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, refused to vote for the waiver.

But there’s another possibility, which is that the generals could serve to constrain Trump. Unlike the president, who has suggested a lack of specific knowledge about the Constitution in the past, military officers are well-versed in the law and their own obligations—a knowledge that manifested itself in Mattis’s comments arguing against torture. They also care deeply about following rules and procedures, and for instilling a sense of order. The last week has shown that Trump’s advisers, by contrast, and in particular Stephen Bannon, are perfectly content with chaos, and perhaps even welcome it.

It’s certainly not unheard of for generals, usually active-duty ones, to play the role of a check on elected leaders, in various forms. In Turkey, the military has tended to view itself as the guardian of secular norms, and has repeatedly stepped in to topple civilian governments that generals feel have strayed from national principles. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly clashed with the nation’s military leaders, who reportedly stayed him from launching an assault against Iran’s nuclear program. In May 2016, Netanyahu scolded Major General Yair Golan for comments critical about Israeli policy.

Some commentators have raised the idea that serving military officers would refuse to execute orders from Trump if they believed they were unconstitutional or violated international treaties. But the idea of military officials acting as a check on elected officials is disconcerting. Even if one thinks Trump is acting lawlessly, a de facto coup is also lawless. There’s no good option.

Mattis and Kelly, however, are now civilian officials. So far, their objections have been private, though waged partly in public via press leaks. The test of whether they will prove to be an effective counterweight to Trump’s overreaches and disregard for protocol will come if he continues to push decisions down on them. Trump cleverly employed retired brass to grant himself credibility, which means that the generals now have some power to revoke that credibility. Would they willing to publicly break with the president? If so, would Trump be willing to fire them?

The 15 Most Talked-About Films From Sundance

Last year’s Sundance Film Festival felt almost serendipitously timed—coming at the same time as the much-derided 2016 Oscar nominations, the buzz for Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation seemed like a much-needed salve to the season of #OscarsSoWhite. The big hit of last year’s festival instead turned out to be Manchester by the Sea, so take all of 2017’s Sundance favorites with a grain of salt.

Streaming brands like Amazon and Netflix are continuing to try and muscle into prestige film contention by bidding high for the distribution rights to the festival’s biggest hits. And though there was no acquisition as splashy as the $17.5 million shelled out for The Birth of a Nation last year, some of the biggest stories told at Sundance 2017 were well outside of Hollywood’s usual homogeny, and give viewers plenty of reasons to be excited for the year in cinema outside of the expected superheroes, sequels, and superhero sequels.

The Big Sick

Amazon

Michael Showalter’s comedy, a semi-autobiographical tale written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon (who are married), inspired one of the biggest bidding wars of the festival. Nanjiani stars as, essentially, himself (a Pakistani immigrant working as a comedian in New York) who falls for a girl (Zoe Kazan) and then begins spending all his time with her out-of-towner parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter) when she is diagnosed with a near-fatal medical condition. Amazon snapped up the rights for $12 million, on the back of excellent reviews, especially for Nanjiani’s lead performance.

Mudbound

Netflix

The latest feature film from Dee Rees (whose debut drama Pariah was one of the highlights of 2011) is an adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s novel, which follows two families (one white, one African-American) growing up alongside each other in rural Mississippi. Mudbound stars Carey Mulligan and Garrett Hedlund, but the biggest raves came for Jason Mitchell (who played Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton) as a World War II veteran returning home to extreme prejudice, and Mary J. Blige, reportedly unrecognizable as his mother. Netflix bought the rights and is promising a limited theatrical release, so the movie will qualify for awards (the streaming service has yet to gain recognition at the Oscars).

Crown Heights

Amazon

The festival’s Audience Award (which has in the past gone to future hits like Whiplash, Precious, and Hustle & Flow) this year went to Crown Heights, a drama set in the Brooklyn neighborhood in the early 1980s. Directed by Matt Ruskin and starring Keith Stanfield (Atlanta), the film dramatizes the true story of Colin Warner, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and fought for years to exonerate his name. Nnamdi Asomugha (yes, the former Oakland Raiders cornerback) plays his best friend, who worked to free him. Amazon acquired Crown Heights for more than $2 million.

Wind River

TWC

Coming off an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan makes his directorial debut at Sundance with the third in his trilogy of films set in the modern, desolate American West (the other was the 2015 DEA drama Sicario). Wind River stars Jeremy Renner as a tracker and Elizabeth Olsen as a rookie FBI agent pursuing a murderer on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation. The movie was praised both for re-capturing the rugged charm of Renner’s star-making work in The Hurt Locker, and for its dramatic visuals. The Weinstein Company has its distribution rights.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

Netflix

The festival’s Grand Jury Prize went to this debut feature from actor Macon Blair (best known for his villainous work in indies like Blue Ruin and Green Room). It stars Melanie Lynskey as a frustrated suburbanite who hires her creep of a neighbor (Elijah Wood) to help her hunt for vigilante justice after her home is burgled. The film’s command of tone, the way it carefully balances taut tension and bizarre comedy, has been widely praised. Netflix will release I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore on its streaming service on February 24.

A Ghost Story

A24

The director David Lowery got mixed, if promising, reviews for his first major feature, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, in 2013; he then got praise for adapting that film’s poetic style for Disney’s Pete’s Dragon in 2016. His latest movie, A Ghost Story, is a weird indie through and through, reuniting Ain’t Them Bodies Saints stars Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. The movie follows a couple who are separated by death; the deceased man haunts his lover, then, when she moves on, the future inhabitants of his house. It’s all shot from a distance, and in one uninterrupted four-minute shot, Rooney Mara eats a pie. It’s drawn raves, though the overall reaction has been polarized, so expect many a hot take. A24 (the studio behind recent hits like Moonlight) has acquired the rights.

Call Me By Your Name

Sony Pictures Classics

André Aciman’s 2007 novel, about a precocious 17-year-old boy falling in love with an older man on vacation in Italy, was wildly acclaimed but seemed like it’d be difficult to translate to screen. But the festival reaction to Luca Guadagnino’s (A Bigger Splash) adaptation was , including praise for its three central performances (from Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Armie Hammer). Sufjan Stevens also contributed a few songs to the score, just as a cherry on top.

Dina

Sundance

The festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Documentary went to this portrait of a couple, both on the autistic spectrum, from the directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles (who made the excellent Mala Mala, which looked at Puerto Rico’s trans community). Reviews called it at once grim, wildly funny, and at times deeply uncomfortable, which sounds about par for a Sundance winner.

Manifesto

Sundance

New Yorkers had a chance to see Manifesto as an art installation over the last couple of months. Now, it’s viewable in movie form, starring Cate Blanchett as 13 characters who each espouse a different, well, artistic manifesto. A fur-clad Dadaist is followed by a stockbroker talking about Futurism and a homeless person arguing for Situationism, and so on and so forth. The film is directed by Julian Rosefeldt, a Berlin-based video installation artist, and, according to reviews, is quite different from the form it took at the Park Avenue Armory.

Casting JonBenet

Netflix

The strange recent wave of nostalgia for the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, which manifested in various 2016 television specials, gets a further layer of meta-commentary in this documentary from Kitty Green. It follows the director as she travels to Colorado to hold a casting call for a fake film about the case, talking to applicants about their own experiences with abuse, crime, and death, as well as their theories on the case. Green is focusing not on the details of the murder itself, but on the strange pop-culture phenomena that built up around it, in a movie that sounds as arresting as it does disturbing.

The Hero

The Orchard

Brett Haley’s last movie I’ll See You in My Dreams (2015) was an underrated comedy-drama starring Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott, a rare romance film focused on an older couple. The director is reunited with Elliott for this drama about an actor who tries to get his life back together after receiving a cancer diagnosis. Laura Prepon (Orange is the New Black), Nick Offerman (Parks & Recreation), and Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones) co-star, but it’s Elliott’s performance that drew most of the raves.

Band Aid

Sundance

The actress Zoe Lister-Jones (best known for her work in sitcoms like New Girl and Life in Pieces) wrote and directed this debut feature, in which she stars alongside Adam Pally as a husband-wife duo who form a band to try and work out their issues with each other. Band Aid’s clever songwriting, and its charming lead performances, have gotten positive notices, along with the fact that the movie’s crew was entirely female, a rarity in the industry.

Marjorie Prime

Sundance

Based on a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Jordan Harrison, Marjorie Prime is a small-scale sci-fi meditation on mortality and memory, with Lois Smith (Minority Report) as an elderly woman who recreates her former husband, digitizing his existence and interacting with the hologram of his younger self (played by Jon Hamm). Think of it as a more melancholy Black Mirror episode. Tim Robbins and Geena Davis co-star, and Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) directs. Marjorie Prime has been called Hamm’s best role in years.

Landline

Amazon

Gillian Robespierre’s film Obvious Child, starring and co-written by Jenny Slate, was one of the biggest surprises of 2014. The two have reunited for this ’90s-set comedy about a Jewish family’s trials and tribulations. John Turturro and Edie Falco co-star in a movie loaded with references to Blockbuster and the thriving magazine industry, in case you forgot it was set 20-plus years ago. Amazon acquired the rights for $3 million.

Brigsby Bear

Sony Pictures Classics

Kyle Mooney’s comedy career on Saturday Night Live has been wildly divisive since he joined: His disconcerting video sketches have rabid fans and loud detractors. It sounds like Brigsby Bear (starring and co-written by Mooney), which has been called the “feel-good kidnapping movie of the year,” will be just as polarizing. It’s a bizarre tale about James (Mooney), who’s stolen from his family as a child, then raised to love a fictional TV show called Brigsby Bear by his kidnappers, designed only to keep him from wanting to escape. After finding his freedom, James wants only to re-create this show that never existed. Of all the films at this year’s festival, none received more love/hate than Brigsby Bear, so of course Sony Pictures Classics acquired it for $5 million after a heated bidding war.

The Organization That Sent Tulsi Gabbard to Syria

The head of the group that organized and paid for Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s trip to Syria says he personally financed the trip in which the Hawaii Democrat met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, denied he had links to Assad or a controversial Syrian political party, and rejected news reports that said his group was anti-Semitic.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Bassam Khawam, a former executive director and current board member of the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS-Ohio), said this wasn’t the first trip his Cleveland-based organization has coordinated for U.S. lawmakers to the Middle East. Founded in 1991 to serve the Arab-American community in Ohio, AACCESS has organized three trips to the region for Dennis Kucinich, the former Democratic congressman from Ohio, between 2006 and 2011;  Khawam said the group did the same for Gabbard, a two-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, because of her expressed interest in the region.

“Congresswoman Gabbard had a position on what’s taking place in Syria, and about regime change, and these sort of things,” Khawam, a Lebanese health-care consultant, told me in an interview. “So we thought … that would be most likely very helpful for her to see things on the ground similar to what we did with Congressman Kucinich.”

Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, has long advocated that the U.S. should focus its efforts in Syria on Islamist groups instead of ousting Assad, whom the Obama administration had called on to step down. She had even criticized Obama for not using the term “radical Islam” to describe groups such as ISIS. And she introduced legislation that would bar the U.S. government from supporting groups allied with or supporting terrorist organizations, some of which are fighting against the Assad regime. Her views on Syria appear to align more closely with those of President Trump, who says the U.S. should focus its efforts on defeating ISIS.

On January 18, Gabbard caused a stir when she revealed her fact-finding trip to Syria this month included a meeting with Assad. She said she hadn’t planned on meeting with the longtime Syrian leader, but that when given the opportunity she felt “it was important to take it,” adding: “I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there’s a chance it can bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering.”

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Returns From Syria with Renewed Calls: End Regime Change War in Syria Now https://t.co/F6kiSzWOGB pic.twitter.com/IxlYLPPnYi

— Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiPress) January 25, 2017

Not all of her colleagues in Congress approved. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois and fellow Iraq veteran, called Gabbard’s meeting with Assad “disgusting” and said the move “legitimized his dictatorship and in turn, legitimized his genocide against the Syrian people.” Democratic leaders have yet to formally comment on the trip, but Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said she wasn’t aware Gabbard was making the trip.   

It’s not uncommon for lawmakers to make foreign trips abroad. In some cases, though, it’s illegal. Under the Logan Act, unauthorized individuals are prohibited from contacting foreign governments that are in dispute with the U.S.—as the Assad regime is. But no one has ever been prosecuted under the law. Khawam said the law “didn’t come up at all” when his organization proposed the trip to the House Ethics Committee.

Although the trip was sponsored by AACCESS, Khawam said it was he and his brother, Elie Khawam, who funded the trip as a non-grant-making donation. Khawam declined to say how much the brothers spent on the trip. Under House rules, such donations can only be made by an individual or entity with “direct involvement in planning, organizing, conducting, or participating” in the trip. Such trips cannot be taxpayer funded. Gabbard originally declined to disclose how the trip was being financed, a precaution she and Khawam attributed to security reasons.

“It’s a very transparent trip,” Khawam said. “The reason it was not advertised is because you’re going to a country that has a war there. ... it’s not something you want to advertise in the media because of safety issues.”

Some news reports have linked Khawam to the Syrian government and Imad Moustapha, who served as the envoy to the U.S. before diplomatic relations between the two countries were suspended in 2012. Khawam called the allegations “utterly, 100 percent wrong.”

“We are in no shape or form a lobbyist for Assad or speaking on his behalf,” Khawam said. “This was a peace mission to visit with the Syrian people and some officials to see how much suffering this country has endured for the last six years.”

When asked about reported allegations that he visited the former Syrian ambassador in Washington, he added: “The only time I visited was at the embassy, to get visas to enter Damascus.”

Khawam has been accused in some news reports of having links to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a secular pro-Assad Lebanese-Syrian political party. The group, considered one of the largest political parties in Syria after the ruling Ba’ath party, has been accused of fascism, anti-Semitism, and has even been likened to the Nazi party, though its members have long repudiated such claims. The party supports Assad, and is believed to have sent between 6,000 to 8,000 fighters to fight on the side of his regime in the civil war.

Khawam said he has contact with many political parties in Lebanon, including SSNP, which lists his brother, Elie, as a member. Khawam said he himself is not a member of the party—though he told me he attended an event associated with it—and said SSNP “did not play any role” with the trip.

“AACCESS is not an anti-Semitic organization … I am not anti-Semitic,” Khawam said, rejecting allegations about the group that have appeared in multiple news stories about Gabbard’s trip. “I don’t understand how this came into the picture or what the SSNP has to do with this accusation. SSNP did not play a role in it; this is the bottom line.”

When asked about the Gabbard trip’s policy goals, Khawam said the organization didn’t have any. “This was a humanitarian trip to go see the refugees and the religious leaders there,” he said. “To see the destruction and to meet with some of the local people there and witness their suffering, to see what they’re all about, and to have accurate information.”

But Khawam also criticized what he called a mischaracterization of the conflict in Syria as a civil war.

“In [the Syrian people’s] mind, it’s a proxy war that’s taking place to divide the people there. It’s an issue of fighting with ISIS, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda elements,”  Khawam said. “This is what it is.”

That’s a position Gabbard appears to share.

The Complicated Relevance of Dr. Seuss's Political Cartoons

Of all the significant cultural figures finding new relevance during a turbulent news cycle, one of the more intriguing is Dr. Seuss. The German American cartoonist and author, born Theodor Seuss Geisel, is best known for his children’s books, The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax, and Horton Hears a Who among them. But for two years starting in 1941, Geisel worked as a political cartoonist for the liberal New York newspaper PM, crafting more than 400 cartoons on the subject of World War Two. One of these in particular, a drawing lampooning the non-Interventionist America First movement, has been reemerging recently amid protests against President Trump’s executive order barring immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries.

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The cartoon, which mocks an apparent blithe naiveté about the dangers posed by Nazi Germany, as well as a callousness regarding the lives of children who aren’t American citizens, makes it a striking accompaniment to modern protests, not least of which is that Trump has named one of his own official platforms “America First.” As a collection, Geisel’s war cartoons target isolationism, anti-Semitism, and racism. They skewer Hitler, Mussolini, and a variety of American nationalists, including Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic priest and radio host Father Charles Coughlin, a fervent anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist. But they also deploy a fierce anti-authoritarianism and humanism that runs through all of Dr. Seuss’s books. Geisel’s political cartoons go a long way in demonstrating how the spirit of Seuss—zany, honest, brash, and brave—was born.

They also have their own flaws, most notably their racist portrayal of both Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans. Geisel’s bigoted treatment of both only a few months before the forced internment of Japanese Americans was something many believe he tried to atone for in his later books. But the body of work he created during the war helped establish the foundations of what the writer Philip Nel has described as “America’s first anti-Fascist children’s writer.” And it helps explain why Dr. Seuss continues to resonate now, 15 years after Geisel’s death, and as American nationalism gains momentum once again.

According to Dr. Seuss Goes to War, Richard H. Minear’s 1999 book on Geisel’s editorial cartoons, PM was founded as an outspoken liberal publication, free of advertising, and funded by its five-cent purchase price. Ralph Ingersoll, its founder, described part of the paper’s mission as opposing “people who push other people around just for the fun of pushing, whether in this country or abroad.” Sometime around January 1941, Geisel drafted his first political cartoon and showed it to a friend who worked at PM, who passed it on to Ingersoll. It depicted Virginio Gayda, an Italian journalist and Fascist whom many saw as a mouthpiece for the dictator Benito Mussolini, beating furiously at the keys of a steam-emitting typewriter, all while suspended from a hook behind him. Geisel attached a note about Gayda with the cartoon that read, “Almost every day, in amongst the thousands of words that he spews forth, there are one or two sentences that, in their complete and obvious disregard of fact, epitomize the Fascist point of view.”

By May 1941, Geisel was publishing as many as seven cartoons a week in PM, and many of his most impassioned works came during this time, in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. One drawing, published in April, depicted a coin featuring an ostrich burying its head in the sand, inscribed as “The Lindbergh Quarter.” Another published the next day showed Americans standing in line to purchase their own ostrich hats, guaranteed to relieve “Hitler headache.” The caption: “We always were suckers for ridiculous hats.”

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Geisel’s antipathy toward anti-interventionists possibly stemmed from his German-American upbringing in Springfield, Massachusetts, and his circle of friends in New York. Minear told me that in 1976, Geisel wrote a note responding to an interview request from Dartmouth College, saying, “I believed the USA would go down the drain if we listened to the America-First-isms of Charles Lindbergh and Senators Wheeler and Nye, and the rotten rot that the Fascist priest Father Coughlin was spewing out on radio. I, probably, was intemperate in my attacks on them. But they almost disarmed this country at the time it was obviously about to be destroyed.”

Geisel took aim at Hitler and Mussolini, at Lindbergh, and particularly at America First adherents, whom he saw as turning a willful blind eye to the dangers posed by Hitler’s Fascist regime, or even directly associating themselves with Nazism. One cartoon, “The Isolationist,” even featured a limerick, accompanying a drawing of a whale suspending himself “safely” on top of a mountain, out of water, and thus out of danger. It reads, “Said a whale, ‘There is so much commotion/Such fights among fish in the ocean/I’m saving my scalp/Living high on an Alp/(Dear Lindy! He gave me the notion!)”

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But after Pearl Harbor, Geisel’s cartoons became more overtly opposed to Japan, and more crude in style. He depicted Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister and Supreme Military Leader of Japan, as an ugly stereotype, with squinting eyes and a sneering grin. In February 1942, he drew a long line of Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. collecting blocks of TNT from a kiosk labeled “Honorable 5th Column,” with one pointing a telescope across the ocean. The caption read, “Waiting for a signal from home.”

It’s more than a little baffling now to see Geisel, who’d railed repeatedly against racism, Jim Crow, and anti-Semitism in his cartoons, proffer up such bigoted depictions of Asians both in the U.S. and overseas. “We all have blind spots,” Minear told me. “I use that as a teaching moment—even Dr. Seuss went astray.” In his book, Minear also points out that such sentiment was common in the New York circles Geisel moved in at the time. Although there were reader complaints about drawings he made mocking dachshunds, and the pacifist John Haynes Holmes, there were no letters recorded objecting to his treatment of Asians.

Minear believes, though, that Geisel tried to make up for his earlier prejudice in later works. “Horton Hears a Who came after a trip to Japan, and is easy to read allegorically,” he told me. “The people of Whoville are Japan, Vlad Vladikoff is Russia, Horton is us/democracy, etc.” Geisel supposedly came up with the idea for Horton, in which an elephant discovers a microscopic universe, on a trip to Japan, and dedicated the 1954 book to a Japanese friend. The theme of the story, that “a person’s a person no matter how small,” seems to offer a note of contrition for jingoistic wartime expressions. In the 1980s, too, according to the writer Donald E. Pease, Geisel scanned his earlier books for racial stereotypes, and altered a reference to a “yellow-faced Chinaman who eats with sticks” in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

Horton isn’t the only book that echoes themes explored in Geisel’s political cartoons. Minear thinks that almost all of his later books (with the exception of the ones designed as reading aids) are political in some way or another. The Lorax is an obvious parable about environmentalism. The Sneetches and Other Stories includes an absurd fable about strange yellow creatures, half of whom have stars on their bellies and discriminate against the other half, and vice versa. The Butter Battle Book seems particularly potent today, with its tales of the Yongs and the Zooks, who live on either side of a vast wall, and hate each other because of the different ways they eat their bread and butter. The two sides create increasingly inventive and destructive weapons to fire over the wall until both come up with a device called the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, which means mutually assured destruction should it ever be fired. The book ends with a standoff, with both sides waiting to see what the other does. It’s a message to children made explicit in what Geisel wanted his last words to be, which he told his biographers, Judith and Neil Morgan, were: “We can and must do better than this!”

Then there’s Yertle the Turtle, a book of stories whose title character is the king of the pond, a ruthless authoritarian who demands that the other turtles stack themselves on top of each other so he can ascend to the top and get a better view. Yertle, who ignores the pain of his underlings, is finally bested by a burp, in a suitably absurd revolution. In the first drawing of him, Minear says, Geisel gave Yertle a Hitler mustache. But now Minear sees another figure in him. Between the narcissism and the arrogance, he says, Yertle “is Trump 50 years ago.”

Little surprise, then, that Geisel’s cartoons, political and non, are finding a new audience now, as protests ramp up against the 45th president, whose affects and actions are at times as recognizable and cartoonish as Dr. Seuss’s characters. It’s hard not to assume Geisel would be cheered by seeing his work inspire signs and memes and viral tweets. “Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world,” he once said. “It’s more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how they can be in whack.”

The CEOs Revolting Against Trump's Travel Ban

Members of the business community are speaking out against President Trump’s travel ban, which several companies and executives say could unfairly target their employees and harm operations. For a president who ran on boosting businesses in the United States, one of his first actions in the White House might actually be bad for business.

On Monday, the Ford Motor Company joined the increasing list companies criticizing the executive order. Bill Ford Jr., the company’s executive chairman, and Mark Fields, its chief executive officer, said in a statement that “we do not support this policy or any other that goes against our values as a company.”

Fields added later on CNN, “I think we’re just going to be a company that lives by its values and let the chips fall where they may.”

Ford is based in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest Arab-American communities in the U.S. The company did not say how many employees might be impacted by the ban. (Ford and Trump have already butted heads on other issues, including when the president took credit for the company’s decision to invest $700 million in Michigan’s Flat Rock Assembly plant, instead of investing $1.6 billion in a factory in Mexico.) For the car company, the decision to stand up against the travel ban was painted as an entirely moral decision, and it’s one plenty of companies seem ready, even eager, to make.

Elon Musk, the CEO of another car manufacturer, Tesla, has begun a campaign to convince Trump to fix the executive order.

Many people negatively affected by this policy are strong supporters of the US. They've done right,not wrong & don't deserve to be rejected.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2017

Criticism goes beyond just car companies. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the ban is hurting his employees around the world, and that “these actions will make America less safe.” The CEOs of Starbucks, Amazon.com, Expedia, Twitter, Nike, all came out in strong opposition to the ban, and on Monday more than 2,000 Google employees in office around the world walked out of work and staged protests.

Tim Cook, Apples’s CEO, said quite plainly, “It is not a policy we support.” He also reminded people that the company’s deceased founder, Steve Jobs, was the son of an immigrant from Syria, a country targeted in Trump’s ban.

Other companies, while not outright criticizing the president, acknowledged the potential harm the executive order may have on employees. JPMorgan Chase executives told employees Monday that they’d have their backs, while General Electric said in a memo the company would “stand with” its workers and try and balance security and the “movement of law abiding people.”

For other companies, their criticism goes beyond strongly worded statements. Airbnb offered to host people impacted by the ban for no charge. Its co-founder tersely said the order was “not right.” Lyft, for its part, sent users a message Saturday calling the ban “antithetical to both Lyft’s and our nation’s core values,” pledging $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed injunctions in courts across the country to allow detained travelers to remain in the U.S.

Lyft’s biggest competitor, Uber, found itself being called a scab because of the way it reacted to the ban. On Saturday, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance held a strike in solidarity with its many immigrant drivers and refused to make pickups at John F. Kennedy International Airport. At the same time, Uber sent out a message to users saying it would cut fares in the area, which some people amounted to undermining the strike. The next day, Uber said it would establish a $3 million legal fund to support drivers impacted by the ban, but by then the hashtag #DeleteUber had already gone viral, with many people taking screenshots of themselves removing the app from their phone.

Many of these companies and executives were members of Trump’s Strategic Policy Forum in December, where they agreed to counsel him in the coming years. But almost immediately, they said the president failed to realize the U.S. economy is not just reliant upon immigrants, but that immigrants are its foundation.

About 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded either by immigrants, or by the sons and daughters of immigrants. Companies like AT&T, IBM, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, McDonald’s, Goldman Sachs, eBay, Kohls, Comcast, Pfizer, Yahoo!, and many others were all founded by immigrants or their children. And U.S. companies founded by immigrants are only becoming more common; one study found immigrants started more than half of all billion-dollars startups, and that immigrants made up 70 percent of key management roles in those companies.

Putting “America first,” as Trump wants, is just not good business for many American companies.

'The President Went Out of His Way to Recognize the Holocaust'

On Friday, the same day that he ordered a halt in the entry of persecuted refugees into the United States, President Trump issued a statement on the Holocaust. In a crisp three paragraphs, Trump said, “It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.” He added that “in the name of the perished,” he would work to prevent such a tragedy again.

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The Trump Administration's Flirtation With Holocaust Denial

Pointedly missing from the statement, as was immediately noticed, was any mention of the Jewish people, of whom roughly 6 million were murdered during the Holocaust. The omission was roundly criticized by Jewish groups, and not just mainstream groups like the Anti-Defamation League, though they were also critical.  The Republican Jewish Coalition weighed in, too, saying that “The lack of a direct statement about the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was an unfortunate omission” and adding, “We hope, going forward, he conveys those feelings when speaking about the Holocaust.” The head of the very conservative Zionist Organization of America, which is funded in part by the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, was blunter. “Especially as a child of Holocaust survivors, I and ZOA are compelled to express our chagrin and deep pain at President Trump, in his Holocaust Remembrance Day Message, omitting any mention of anti-Semitism and the six million Jews who were targeted and murdered by the German Nazi regime and others,” Mort Klein said in a statement. (The ZOA kicked up a controversy when it announced that Steve Bannon would attend a dinner it was throwing in November. Bannon then never showed.)

But the White House wants credit anyway. Press Secretary Sean Spicer was quizzed on the omission during a briefing on Monday. As to criticism, Spicer said, “He’s aware of what people have been saying, but I think by and large he’s been praised for it.”

Spicer added:

I gotta be honest, the president went out of his way to recognize the Holocaust and the suffering that went through and the people that were affected by it and the loss of life, and to make sure that American never forgets what so many people went through, whether they were Jews or gypsies, gays, disability [sic] … I mean priests…

This is a double act of revisionism. For most mainstream scholars, the Holocaust refers specifically to the extermination of Jews. While the Nazis killed others en masse, the Holocaust itself refers to the killing of Jews, and the other murders were contemporary but different.

The Holocaust Museum on Monday issued a statement that did not mention Trump by name but sharply criticized his approach. The museum notes that “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators,” the statement said. “Millions of other innocent civilians were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but the elimination of Jews was central to Nazi policy. As Elie Wiesel said, ‘Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.’”

Historian Deborah Lipstadt writes that the “de-Judaization” represented by Trump’s statement is historically inaccurate. “Had the Germans won they probably would have eliminated millions of other peoples, including the Roma, homosexuals, dissidents of any kind, and other ‘useless eaters,’” Lipstadt writes in a piece accusing the White House of “softcore” Holocaust denial. “But it was only the Jews whose destruction could not wait until after the war. Only in the case of the Jews could war priorities be overridden.”

Yet despite the warnings and complaints of advocates and historians alike, Spicer again on Monday once again trotted out the parade of other victims of the Holocaust to excuse the omission.

The other act of revisionism in Spicer’s defense is the even more audacious one of claiming that Trump should be lauded for going “out of his way to recognize the Holocaust.” There was a reason that Trump’s statement came out, rather uncomfortably, on the same day as the immigration executive order targeting travelers from several mostly Muslim countries: Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the great effort Trump made was to issue a three-paragraph statement.  

Spicer tried to deflect attention away from the Holocaust on two separate matters, by changing the subject away from the substance of the statement and toward Trump’s policies toward Israel as well as toward the aides who helped draft it.

Spicer first conflated support for Israel with recognition of Jewish deaths. “With regard to Israel and the Jewish people generally there’s been no better friend that Donald Trump,” Spicer said. He argued that the Obama administration’s differences with the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had received too little scrutiny from the press compared to the current president’s statement. There’s no obvious reason, however, why Trump’s steadfast support for the Israeli right ought to excuse him from recognizing the centrality of Jewish genocide in the Holocaust.

Later in the briefing, Spicer got increasingly agitated after another question on the topic. “The statement was written with the help of an individual who’s both Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors,” he said. (Spicer appeared to be referring to Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, though he would not directly acknowledge that.) “To suggest that remembering the Holocaust and acknowledging all of the people, Jewish, gypsies, priests, disabled, gays, and lesbians—it is pathetic that people are picking on a statement.”

The question is not, however, whether some of Trump’s best advisers are Jewish, so to speak, but whether the president will emphasize the Jewish deaths at Nazi hands. This makes for bizarre politics, too. Why would Trump’s spokesman pick a fight with the Republican Jewish Coalition and the ZOA, groups that have been solidly in Trump’s corner even as he comes under harsh attacks for flirtations with white supremacists from other parties?

Trump and his aides have taken a stance of never admitting error or backtracking. In this case, the White House could say that the omission was an inadvertent one, apologize, and declare the matter closed. Instead, the administration is choosing to insist they did nothing wrong, adopt a discredited historical revisionism, and call its own political allies “pathetic” instead. So far, it must be said, this statement has left Trump in good stead: He continues to notch political victories, and many of his supporters praise him for not backing down. But logic dictates that such an approach must eventually bring peril.

The broader implications of the Trump strategy aside, the pushback with regards to Friday’s statement represents a dramatic case of setting expectations low. If President Trump demands congratulations simply for recognizing the Holocaust, then surely it must be too much to ask that he recognize the Jewish character of the catastrophe.

The Australian Open Turned Back the Clock

There is an age-old archetype in sports of the decorated legend who, with nothing left to prove, throws in the towel to rapturous applause. They’ve served the game for a decade or even two, created sparkling moments that will live in the memories of those who’ve witnessed them, in person or on television, as adults or kids. Kobe Bryant, Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Ryan Giggs, Michael Phelps, and Peyton Manning are among the greats who’ve recently walked out of the game and into the history books. All were legends who retired and made way for younger, fresher blood, and who recognized the sport could and would evolve without them.

So when the 35-year-old Roger Federer threw his hands up and leapt in celebration after beating his longtime nemesis Rafael Nadal 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 in a thrilling final of the Australian Open Sunday morning, the expression on his face seemed to suggest that he had just cheated history. It was a tearful smile of disbelief and awe, a rare look for a man who has played almost 30 Grand Slam finals and had just clinched an 18th. It was a beautifully cyclical moment, a display of raw emotion tennis fans haven’t often seen on the famously stoic Swiss.

The 30-year-old Nadal had a similar look a couple of days earlier, when he collapsed to the floor after clinching an exhausting fifth set in his semi-final against Grigor Dimitrov, burying his face in his hands and shaking his head as he lifted himself off the court. Tennis fans saw this same expression in the women’s singles semi-final as well, when Venus Williams, 36, was unable to control her sheer joy at the prospect of winning her first Major in almost nine years. On Saturday, Williams, the oldest women’s singles finalist in the Open Era, faced her sister Serena, who at 35, has showed little sign of slowing down as she not only regained the No. 1 ranking but also won her 23rd Grand Slam title, surpassing Steffi Graf.

The script that unfolded this weekend in the Rod Laver Arena, then, could not have been any more compelling. Here was a rare chance for a sport to turn back the clock and relive, for an extended moment, some of its glory days. The matches were preceded by intense coverage of past epic battles waged between the two sets of players, battles that few imagined would happen again. But the men’s and women’s finals proved to be far more than just nostalgic events. They were dynamic and genuinely fascinating match-ups that hinted at where these athletes’ seasons, perhaps even their careers, could be headed in the future.

After beating Mischa Zverev in the quarter-final in straight sets, Federer repeated a common gripe about how the game has changed from a faster, serve-and-volley approach to a more defensive, endurance-heavy one. “I used to like those days,” he told Jim Courier. “It makes for nice points, a lot of passing shots and volley winners. The game has changed; tournament directors chose to make it slower. Tennis balls have become slower too,” he added. “But it’s okay, I had to adapt my style. I enjoy this too, the baseline slogfest.” Federer has indeed adapted his play like few could at his age, having struggled with career-threatening knee or back injuries that kept him off the tour for six months, and not having won a Major in five years. While he can no longer hope to match the groundstrokes of powerful, younger players like Novak Djokovic or Andy Murray, who both lost in shock upsets in earlier rounds, Federer has cracked the code to tackling these kinds of players while staying true to his own game on one of his favorite surfaces.

Throughout the tournament, he was running consistently less than his opponents while hitting more winners and aces, and taking more points at the net; this kept rallies short and preserved the energy that took him to the championship. Not only was he covering less distance, he was, as Craig O’Shannessy points out, also moving considerably less per point than anyone else. In essence, Federer knew exactly what he needed to do coming into Sunday’s final. In their many matches over the years, Nadal still held a narrow head-to-head lead on hard courts against the Swiss, and a lead of 9 wins versus Federer’s 2 in Grand Slams overall, a number that would have definitely given him a mental advantage.

It’s fitting then that Federer, known for his fluid and offensive play, faced off against the man that in many way ushered in the new era of hard-hitting groundstrokes lathered with unmanageable topspin, meant to tirelessly wear the opponent down. While Nadal has struggled with a nagging wrist injury that kept him out of contention for much of the last season, he seems to have bounced back this year with his monstrous cross-court forehand—which has inflicted much damage on Federer’s backhand in the past—intact.

Whatever happens to these legends on the 2017 tour, tennis fans will have savored the unlikely trip back in time this weekend.

But on Sunday, Nadal’s relentless push to get to every ball was matched by the 17th-seeded Federer. In addition to doing what he does best, by winning the lion’s share of his points at the net and hitting five times as many aces as Nadal, Federer also challenged  his opponent at his own game. Somewhat uncharacteristically, he came out on top of longer rallies, including a marathon 26-shot baseline spar that ended with a piercing forehand down the line. After the semifinal round, Federer noted that he would leave it all out on the court, even if he couldn’t walk for five months after, and he appeared to keep that promise on Sunday, covering almost as much distance as Nadal, both overall (2 miles) and per point (37.4 feet).

In the six consecutive years (2005-2010) that they topped the Association of Tennis Professionals rankings, the pair have played some of the greatest matches in the Open Era. The most recent Grand Slam final meeting between the two took place at the 2009 Australian Open; Nadal won in five sets, beating a tearful Federer. This year, the Swiss was in tears for happier reasons, shaking his head at perhaps the sweetest and most unlikely of victories in an already glittering career. “I just wanted to make the quarter-finals,” he said, laughing, in his post-match speech.

A day before that game, the world witnessed another classic throwback tennis rivalry, as the Williams sisters faced each other in a Grand Slam final for the first time since Serena’s victory at Wimbledon in 2009, which also marked Venus’s last singles finals appearance in a major. The sisters, who have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles playing together and hold an astonishing 30 singles titles combined, still had much individual glory on the line to play for in this game.

Serena, widely considered to be the best tennis player of all time, was the clear favorite going into the match, having all but dominated the game over the last five seasons. In 2015, she won four consecutive Grand Slam titles for the second time, a feat so immense it’s been dubbed a “Serena Slam.” While Venus gave little away in a tight match that saw only two breaks of her serve, Serena came out on top to win in straight sets 6-4, 6-4, racking up a seventh Australian Open, and a 23rd Grand Slam title overall, the most by any singles player in the Open Era. The match proved to be high-octane, with two of the game’s fastest and hardest serves facing off against each other, but Serena’s aggressive play saw her kill off points quickly; the average rally length was a quick-fire three shots per rally. Shorter points meant she was able to use her powerful groundstrokes to wear her older sister down (visible toward the tail-end of the match), hit 27 winners to just 23 unforced errors, and capitalize on her incisive serve.

In both finals, all four players managed to simultaneously create history and relive it, prompting the question: What will happen to them now? In the case of the women’s game, Serena is likely to add to her successes for at least another two seasons, given her dominance over her closest competitors, Angelique Kerber and Agnieszka Radwanska. Kerber, who returned the No. 1 ranking to Serena after Saturday’s results, has won just two Majors in the shadow of the younger Williams sister. Venus, who missed out on the chance at an eighth major title, is now more likely to start shifting focus to a still-strong doubles career with her sister; we may not be so lucky as to see her in another Grand Slam final.

The men’s game is more difficult to predict. While the fact that Federer and Nadal reached a Grand Slam final in 2017 is a testament to their longevity and skill, it’s notable that in the absence of Djokovic and Murray (and, to a lesser extent, Stan Wawrinka), arguably the stalwarts of the current generation, there are few players who are able to proffer challenges at the highest level. Sunday’s 18th Grand Slam for Federer may well be the high note he’s been waiting for before announcing eventual retirement, something he’s fiercely held off on doing. The Swiss quickly hinted at the possibility of not returning to Melbourne in his post-match speech, saying, “I hope to see you next year, and if not, it was a wonderful run.”

However, given his current boost of confidence, and Wimbledon (his favorite tournament) on the horizon, a 19th  title could always be in the cards. A seemingly revived Nadal was also no doubt inspired by a successful run in Australia, and is probably relishing the chance to return to the clay—a surface he’s conquered—at the French Open in June. Whatever happens to these legends on the 2017 tour, tennis fans will have savored the unlikely trip back in time this weekend, to bear witness to two iconic rivalries that may have finally come to a fitting end.