Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 17

How Many of His 'Day One' Promises Did Trump Fulfill?

“On Day One.” The notion of immediately turning the page on policy is a staple of presidential transitions, from Franklin Roosevelt’s “first 100 days” on, but Donald Trump made the promise of things he’d get done on his first day in the White House into a special mantra throughout the campaign.

The full list, as Tim Murphy chronicled, included some things that were either wildly implausible and evidently figurative, or things that are impossible to assess. (How would you “fix” the Veterans Affairs Department on Day One? What does it mean to start taking care of the military?) But Trump also laid out a set of 18 specific, discrete promises for his first day in office in what he called a “Contract With the American Voter.” So how did he do?

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The Trump Promise Tracker

First, let’s acknowledge that Trump changed the criteria a little bit, designating Monday as his real first day. “I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” he told The Times of London. With that, on to the promises.

The first six concern corruption:

Propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.

If Trump has proposed such an amendment formally, there’s been no public announcement of such.

Complete? No.

A hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).

Trump signed a memorandum on Monday declaring, “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order a freeze on the hiring of Federal civilian employees to be applied across the board in the executive branch. As part of this freeze, no vacant positions existing at noon on January 22, 2017, may be filled and no new positions may be created, except in limited circumstances.” Interestingly, the Contract said it would exclude public safety and public health, but the order excepts only military personnel. The order does, however, offer heads of agencies wide leeway to ignore it: “The head of any executive department or agency may exempt from the hiring freeze any positions that it deems necessary to meet national security or public safety responsibilities.”

Complete? Yes.

A requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.

There’s no indication that Trump has issued such an order, though White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Friday sent a memo freezing all new regulations until they can be reviewed by Trump appointees.

Complete? No.

A five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.

There’s no indication of such a ban. While Trump could likely make such a rule for executive-branch employees, he probably could not do so for congressional ones without Congress’s assistance.

Complete? No.

A lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

There’s no indication that Trump has issued such a ban.

Complete? No.

A complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.

There’s no indication that Trump has issued such a ban.

Complete? No.

The next seven promises have been billed as helping American workers:

I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205.

On Sunday, Trump reiterated his declaration that he will renegotiate NAFTA or else walk away from it. It’s unclear what weight a written declaration to that effect would carry beyond what he has already said; there were reports he would sign one Monday anyway, but none has materialized as of writing. As White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer noted on Monday, Trump would have to notify the other parties to NAFTA if he intended to withdraw the United States from the treaty, under section 2205 of the agreement, but the president has said he’s open to simply revising the existing treaty.

Complete? Yes.

I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In a memorandum to the U.S. trade representative on Monday, Trump wrote, “I hereby direct you to withdraw the United States as a signatory to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to permanently withdraw the United States from TPP negotiations, and to begin pursuing, wherever possible, bilateral trade negotiations to promote American industry, protect American workers, and raise American wages.”

Complete? Yes.

I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.

There’s no public announcement of such a directive. One possible road bump: Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s nominee for the post of Treasury secretary, has not yet been confirmed, meaning the job is open.

Complete? No.

I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately.

Once again, Trump has not publicly announced or released the text of such a directive. The commerce secretary-designate, Wilbur Ross, has also not yet been confirmed.

Complete? No.

I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.

This is one of vaguest of the pledges. Trump has not publicly announced any changes.

Complete? No.

Lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.

Trump has not released any memorandum or order bearing on the fate of the controversial pipeline, which the Obama administration blocked.

Complete? No.

Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.

Trump has not released any directive bearing on UN funding.

Complete? No.

The final set of actions in the Contract were labeled as “restor[ing] security and the constitutional rule of law”:

Cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.

This vow necessarily includes a great deal of subjectivity—unless the Supreme Court has made a ruling, who is to say what is and is not unconstitutional? Trump did not issue a large flurry of his own orders revoking Obama’s, either on Friday or on Monday. Trump did, however, reinstitute the “Mexico City Policy,” which bars U.S. government funding for organizations that fund abortion overseas.

Complete? Partly.

Begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Trump met with William Pryor, one potential appointee, even before the inauguration, and Spicer indicated the choice would be made within two weeks.

Complete? Yes.

Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.

Trump has not issued any order or directive attempting to strip funding from sanctuary cities, although it’s not clear he has the authority to do so anyway.

Complete? No.

Begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.

Trump has not issued any statements, directives, or order on immigration.

Complete? No.

Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting.”

Again, Trump has not made public any statements or directives related to suspending immigration or reworking the vetting process.

Complete? No.

* * *

It’s not a great score, even allowing for the extra three days: four or a generous five out of 18 complete. (It’s not the first time Trump didn’t follow through on a contract.) That doesn’t mean Trump won’t eventually keep these promises. During Monday’s White House briefing, Spicer was asked why the president hadn’t done all those things.

“We’re going to continue to sequence that out,” he said. “I think part of that is to make sure that we don’t spend out entire day signing executive orders and bringing you in. There’s a way that we can do this to make sure that we’re getting all those things that he promised the American people done in short haste.”

In other words: Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have said we’d get all that stuff done quite on Day One. Even for a president who pledged to reject the bureaucratic quicksand of Washington, D.C., it’s not always easy to get things done as quickly as one might hope. But studies show that presidents do in fact follow through on most of their promises, and President Trump has a long list of other, larger vows to work on now.

There Are No Easy Answers in Beware the Slenderman

One late spring day in 2014, three girls entered the woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Two walked out unharmed. A 911 call made not long after revealed the hazy outline of a vicious attack—one of the girls had been found by the side of the road covered in blood, having crawled there to get help. In the days and weeks that followed, details emerged that were no less disturbing: The three girls, all 12 years old, were best friends. The victim had been stabbed 19 times with a 5-inch blade and had barely survived. After being taken into police custody, the other two girls told interrogators what had happened: They had lured their friend into the woods to kill her so that they could appease someone called Slenderman.

Those who have spent any time on the internet since 2009 and who possess a passing familiarity with memes have probably heard of the fictional subject of HBO’s new documentary, Beware the Slenderman, airing Monday. He’s tall and pale with long limbs and no face. He usually wears a suit. Depending on who’s doing the telling, he abducts children or is otherwise considered an evil spirit; sometimes he’s more of a guardian angel. Most importantly, the two girls at the center of the 2014 stabbing, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, believed he was real—real enough that they insisted the attack on their friend “had to be done.”

Beware the Slenderman, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, is a true-crime film that’s less interested in ascertaining guilt (since the girls confessed) than in the psychology and social factors that led to the stabbing in the first place. It deftly examines the rise of the Slenderman myth online, via online horror stories and art known as “creepypastas,” message boards, fan sites, and social media. But it also looks at the tangled intersection of children’s neurological development, the ubiquity of internet access, literary history, adolescent insecurities, and mental illness—as well as the criminal-justice system responsible for punishing the girls. In response to the question, “How could this have happened?” Beware the Slenderman stubbornly refuses to give a simple answer, or any of the expected ones (bad parenting, the internet is evil, children are gullible, children can be monsters). Despite this complexity, Brodsky succeeds at closing the psychological distance between the viewers and a crime that initially feels remote, weird, and unthinkable.

Contrary to the mythology that has built up around Slenderman, which  suggests that he’s been around for centuries, the character was in fact first developed in 2009 for a horror photoshop contest. Since then, he’s amassed a huge online fan base, inspiring people to develop elaborate riffs on his backstory, create fake “footage” of sightings, make themed art, and more. As the documentary shows, it’s this world that captured the imaginations of Geyser and Weier, who have both been incarcerated for the last two years. Though the trial date is still pending, they’re set to be tried as adults for attempted first-degree intentional homicide; if convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 65 years in state prison.

After a quick introduction to the crime, Beware the Slenderman goes back in time—to the childhoods of Geyser and Weier. Not only that, but their childhoods as narrated by their parents. The choice to do so may raise eyebrows; it can be seen as an uncomfortable effort to immediately humanize the perpetrators without offering the perspective of the victim herself, Payton “Bella” Leutner (who has since recovered from her injuries and returned to school). But, in a way, the director’s decision was made for her—Leutner’s family repeatedly declined Brodsky’s requests to interview them and the girl herself.

“Let’s face it, that is an unpopular tack,” Brodsky told me of the choice to spend the bulk of the film’s time on the perpetrators and their families. “I think it’s hard to have sympathy for someone who is capable of such violence and calculates it.” As a result, Brodsky said she felt she had an obligation to go “deep down into the rabbit hole of [Geyser and Weier’s] brains,” to use that extra bandwidth to delve into the psychology of the crime. Though she initially intended to follow the case through to the trial, she eventually realized that doing so would add little to the story: The girls already confessed, and most of the details surrounding the crime had come to light.

“This was a whole fantastical universe they had created in their head that had its own set of rules.”

Hence, Beware the Slenderman’s unsettlingly close look at Geyser and Weier—unsettling because the film forces viewers to look past the reductive labeling of them as “monsters.” The documentary gets a glimpse of Geyser’s earliest years, cute home videos shot by her mother, before revealing that she had issues with empathy from a young age (her mother recalls Geyser watching Bambi and expressing no sadness when the baby deer’s mom was killed). Later, the film reveals some devastating details about her mental illness—diagnosed as childhood-onset schizophrenia—and her father’s experiences with the same disorder. With Weier, viewers learn about her loneliness, and how she cried constantly while at school, and how she was part of a choir and how her father kept a close watch on her internet use. It’s a picture that’s difficult to stomach alongside the reports that Weier was the one who ordered the killing, with the words “Go ballistic; go crazy,” and that Geyser eventually complied, telling Leutner, “I’m so sorry,” right before stabbing her.

If there’s a main thread to Beware the Slenderman, it’s how blurry the line between reality and fantasy can be for children, and how that line is especially exacerbated by constant internet use and other neurological and social factors. The common fear when it comes to children, especially girls, using the internet is predators—strangers who might manipulate or hurt them. This was Brodsky’s initial assumption when she heard about the attack. “I remember suspecting, erroneously, that someone was trolling them on the internet and had encouraged them to do this—that they were communicating with a real person who was impersonating Slenderman,” Brodsky told me. But as she did more research on the case, she realized: “No one was telling them to commit this act. This was a whole fantastical universe they had created in their head that had its own mythology, its own set of rules.”

“How much are you going to hold a child accountable for this adult playground that we allow them to play in?”

The case bears some superficial similarities to another popular creepypasta—a story known as “Candle Cove” (written the same year Slenderman was created). The tale, about an eerie children’s show, was turned into a 2016 Syfy horror show called Channel Zero, whose first season centers on the mind-controlling powers of a piece of children’s entertainment, and adults’ inability to see kids as capable of frightening violence. As kids start using the internet  younger and more frequently (many elementary schools give iPads to every student, for instance), pop culture is likely to see more stories exploring the darker side of how childhood is influenced by media consumption, new technology, and the fuzzy reality-fantasy line.

While Brodsky asks an array of experts to weigh in on the different facets of the case—the literary precedents of Slenderman (the Pied Piper of Hamelin), meme culture, neuropsychology—she doesn’t dig much into the question of whether a Wisconsin judge was right to determine that Weier and Geyser be tried as adults. (State law requires first-degree attempted homicide cases to be tried in adult court if the accused is 10 or older.) “There are only so many experts that can argue this because so much of this boils down to your basic value system as a viewer,” Brodsky explained. “How much are you going to hold a child accountable for this adult playground that we allow them to play in?”  

Despite using footage of courtroom testimony and police interrogation, Brodsky doesn’t try to litigate different aspects of the case (not just the girls’ guilt, but also whether different pieces of evidence should be ruled as inadmissible). As a result, Beware the Slenderman is able to keep its eye on the bigger picture. It’s able to spend time with Weier and Geyser’s parents, and watch them do the difficult work of resuming their daily lives while coping with the fact that their daughters nearly killed someone. It touches on the pain and stigma of mental illness. It presses the importance of monitoring children’s internet use—while acknowledges that such monitoring can only go so far. And the film does all this without fear-mongering or prioritizing sensationalism over its subjects’ humanity. While Beware the Slenderman isn’t an easy watch—and will undoubtedly inspire anxiety and panic in some viewers, particularly parents—it’s a worthy one that helps make sense of a senseless crime.

How Madonna Gave Trump Ammo With a Cry for Peace

Some of the events of this past weekend—the size of the protest crowds, the question-free “alternative facts” press briefing—were without precedent. But one was so familiar that it warrants a Groundhog’s Day comparison: Madonna said something controversial, and controversy ensued.

Early in her speech to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., Madonna gave a message “to our detractors that insist this march will never add up to anything.”

That message: “Fuck you. Fuck you.”

“Yes, I’m angry,” she went on to say. “Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

“But,” she added, “I know that this won’t change anything. We can’t fall into despair. As the poet W.H. Auden once wrote on the eve of World War II, we must love one another or die. I choose love. Are you with me? Say this with me. We choose love. We choose love. We choose love.”

Her speech has now taken on outsized importance in reactions to the Women’s March, especially among conservatives. Newt Gingrich and Piers Morgan both said Madonna should be arrested. Kellyanne Conway, on the same afternoon where she coined the term “alternative facts,” directed a question about the march toward the pop star:

You have celebrities from the podium using profanity-laced insults. You have a very prominent singer who’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars not going over to a woman’s shelter here in D.C. to write a check, but instead saying that she thought of, quote, “burning down the White House.”

Of course, Madonna’s message was not as inflammatory as it was made to sound: She’s against violence, and she mentioned her terrorist impulses only to reject them. In a statement on Sunday, she further clarified her “one phrase taken wildly out of context,” saying, “I spoke in metaphor and I shared two ways of looking at things—one was to be hopeful, and one was to feel anger and outrage, which I have personally felt. However, I know that acting out of anger doesn’t solve anything. And the only way to change things for the better is to do it with love.”

The entire episode slots neatly into Madonna’s history of causing controversy. It’s not that she stumbles into outrage—it’s that she, as much as any major public figure save perhaps the new president, likes to offend and then tell the offended they just don’t understand. It was this way when the “Like a Prayer” video received the Vatican’s condemnation; it was this way when she used the word “fuck” 14 times on Letterman in 1994; it was this way when she compared herself to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2015. On Saturday, Madonna surely realized the image of a burning White House would be more likely to raise cries of “WTF” than of  “Kumbaya,” but her career demonstrates a preference for drawing attention over avoiding conflict.

That the counterargument is easy—it’s not how you say it but what you say—may not matter.

After so many years of trolling, why does anyone take Madonna’s bait? This time, there’s a clear, if cynical, rationale for doing so. Conservative coverage of the signs and chants this weekend often emphasized the marchers’ vulgarity and impolite words, implying not only moral lapses but also hypocrisy given the criticism that Trump’s vulgarity and impoliteness has received. Rhetoric like Madonna’s further helps Gingrich, Conway, and other Trump surrogates to paint the opposition as extreme and profane. That the counterargument—it’s not how you say it but what you say—is easy doesn’t stop the argument from getting made.

There’s also the cultural-divisions angle. Not all of Madonna’s fans love her antics, but many recognize those antics are linked to her appeal; she’s great because she expresses herself in a way that defies stigmas, pretensions, and hangups. But for a portion of the electorate that just elected Trump, her explicit language and flirtation with violence seemingly are a symptom of the dangers that come with liberal culture. Celebrities also are magnets for resentment because, with their fame, riches, and airs of importance, they are so clearly not “the people.”

Donald Trump’s team on the campaign trail, in booking the inauguration, and now, have set out to exploit all of these dynamics. “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.” The last sentence may have seemed like a non sequitur—unless you’d heard what Madonna said.

Deciphering the Bizarre Twist Ending of Split

This article spoils the entire plot, and twist ending, of Split .

M. Night Shyamalan is a writer and director who is legendarily fond of the surprise twist ending. It was a stunt that made his career with his third film, The Sixth Sense, in 1999, turning a small-scale ghost story into a word-of-mouth smash hit that dominated the box office for an entire summer. He’s deployed it over and over throughout his career, to arguably diminishing returns, before dropping it entirely. But recently, as he’s dipped back into the horror genre that put his name on the map, he’s brought back his favorite gimmick, and his new film Split has a final reveal that is too bonkers not to discuss—one that redefines the overall thrust of the film, and that ends up referring back to his larger oeuvre in an unconventional way.

Shyamalan has always enjoyed playing with broad genre tropes—The Sixth Sense is a ghost story, Unbreakable is a superhero movie, Signs an alien invasion film, Lady in the Water an outlandish piece of high fantasy. Split takes two traditional premises and mashes them together: Three girls get kidnapped and locked in a basement by the villainous Kevin, and he (James McAvoy) turns out to have a heightened, fictionalized version of dissociative identity disorder, housing 23 “distinct personalities” in one body and warning that a terrifying 24th personality is on the way. The film plays out as tense thriller more than jumpy horror, as Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) tries to negotiate her way to freedom by playing the personalities off of each other.

Split plays around with themes of mental illness and trauma in a very schlocky manner, and the patience you might have for that will vary wildly from viewer to viewer. But it’s the final minutes of the film that are sure to prompt the most head-scratching debate, as Kevin’s monstrous “beast” personality finally emerges and he begins rampaging around the city, able to crawl the walls and seemingly invulnerable to attack. It’s suddenly like something out of a comic book: Kevin monologues to himself about his newly developed power, and professes an outlook for humanity where only those like him—people who have suffered deep trauma—are worthy of survival.

Then we cut to a local diner, where news of Kevin is spreading on the television, with reporters giving him his very own villainous name, “The Horde.” A customer remarks that it reminds them of another person, “that guy in the wheelchair,” not recalling his name. The camera then pans over to David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who grunts, “Mr. Glass,” before taking a sip of his coffee and leaving. Dunn, in case you forgot (and, one assumes, most filmgoers have), is the lead character of Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable, a bleak subversion of the superhero genre that has since then become one of his best-remembered films (Mr. Glass was its Lex Luthor-like villain, a wheelchair-bound, brittle-boned mastermind played by Samuel L. Jackson).

It is a bizarre, daring thing to do—to have the twist to one movie be that it was, in fact, a quasi-sequel to an entirely different movie, one that was seen as a relative box office disappointment when it was released nearly seventeen years ago. For fans of the Shyamalan filmography, it’s a delight—a daft throwback to an underrated film that could serve as a tease for a future sequel, in which David Dunn and “The Horde” do battle. For everyone else, it’s a more forgettable curio, a strange cameo from a recognizable movie star that seems entirely unrelated to the preceding two hours of action.

Shyamalan said he had planned it that way for a long time, first developing the split-personality villain Kevin as a possible foil for the nigh-invulnerable David Dunn in the original Unbreakable. “I had about 15-20 pages written [focusing on Kevin] and those scenes are all in [Split],” he told io9 in an interview. When he began developing Split, he wondered if he could make it “a sequel they don’t realize is a sequel … [that] plays like a thriller and becomes an origin story,” and pitched Willis on the cameo (the actor, who has long expressed interest in making another Unbreakable, immediately agreed). If the reveal works, it could lead to another film, which Shyamalan says he hopes will happen. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go off in my room, a week after this film opens, to write the script. But I’m going to start writing,” he told Entertainment Weekly in another interview.

In a world where “cinematic universes” have become commonplace, any brand name, no matter how faded or niche, suddenly has more cache. When Unbreakable came out in 2000, it grossed $95 million domestically and $248 million worldwide, a healthy take that was nonetheless far off from The Sixth Sense’s bonanza the year before ($293 million domestic, $672 million worldwide). A sequel then would have been outlandish, but now, studios are more willing to bet on any property that might be recognizable to audiences—how else to explain a planned Tetris trilogy of films, or the return of the Power Rangers, or the fact that both Underworld and Resident Evil are releasing sequels this month?

But beyond the business implications, the twist re-contextualizes Split in a very interesting way, slyly (and, some might argue, cheaply) sidestepping some of the film’s more uncomfortable themes. Kevin’s mental illness, a ridiculous inflation of the already-controversial dissociative identity disorder, makes more sense as the origin of a supervillain’s powers—in fact, it’s not unlike that of the X-Men character Legion, a mutant with multiple personalities, who has his own show on FX starting next month. Split simplifies issues deserving of more complex examination, but that’s a hallmark of the golden-age comic books Unbreakable paid homage to. That film had Split’s dark tone, while retaining the pulp sensibility of a superhero story. In a Hollywood now overrun with a more corporate, audience-friendly brand of blockbuster do-gooders, it’s the right time for something stranger to exist alongside them. That is Shyamalan’s ultimate gambit.

Saturday Night Live Faces Off Against the Trump Presidency

Donald Trump didn’t make an appearance on the first Saturday Night Live of his presidency, at least not in the guise of his TV alter ego, Alec Baldwin’s pouting, preening impersonation. But Trump’s presence dominated the show, from the cold open featuring Beck Bennett as a joyful Vladimir Putin to a video skit in which Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway sang a musical tribute to her newfound fame. This much was clear: The NBC sketch show has no intention of easing up on the new commander-in-chief, and at times seemed to actively position itself as a force of resistance.

SNL’s determination to keep being a thorn in the side of the 45th president, who’s complained on Twitter that its portrayal of him is a “complete hit job,” was crystallized in the opening monologue of the January 21st episode, delivered by the comedian and first-time host Aziz Ansari. For almost nine minutes, Ansari pondered the new president (“He’s probably at home right now watching a brown guy make fun of him”), Islamophobia in the media, and the alt-right, which he dubbed the “lower-case KKK.”

Warning against demonizing all Trump voters, Ansari instead focused on a particular subset, which he described as “these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! We don’t have to pretend anymore! We can be racist again! Wooooo!’” As he delivered the joke, Ansari offered the crowd a fist-bump, which slowly changed shape into a Nazi salute.

Baldwin’s guest appearances on Saturday Night Live have sharpened the show’s satire when it comes to Trump, but have also meant that the most talked-about man in America is portrayed by a part-time player. So his absence was notable on a day in which millions of protestors took to cities all over the world to express their objections to the new U.S. president. The show’s response was to focus on the constellation of characters around Trump, starting with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, who addressed America while shirtless in “a paid message from the Russian Federation” delivered via the state-sponsored cable network RT. “You are worried that your country is in the hands of this unpredictable man, but don’t worry, it’s not,” he smirked. “I promise that we will take care of America. It’s the most expensive thing we’ve ever bought.”

Later, SNL presented a pre-taped skit featuring Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Trump throughout much of his campaign, and a newly appointed counselor to the president. In the past, McKinnon’s Conway has come across as partly sympathetic, particularly in the video “Kellyanne’s Day Off,” in which a beleaguered Conway is repeatedly forced to interrupt a day with her husband and kids in order to make excuses for Trump’s outlandish statements on cable news. Saturday’s sketch was less generous. McKinnon, seen as Conway giving an interview to Jake Tapper (Bennett), imagined an elaborate fantasia in which she was a star, shimmying through a version of a song from the musical Chicago. “The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be … Conway,” McKinnon sang. “Who says that lying’s not an art?”

She's gonna be a star!

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

One of the many things that is remarkable about the Trump administration is its devotion, even in its first days, to a particular variety of pointless falsehood.

Mendacity among politicians and the spokespeople hired to spin for them runs across eras and aisles, though it is true that some are more honest than others, and Donald Trump was a historically dishonest presidential candidate. But the Trump administration has displayed a commitment to needlessly lying that is confounding to even the most cynical observers of American politics.

No incident better summarizes this than a bizarre briefing by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday. Speaking in the Brady Briefing Room, Spicer laid into the assembled reporters.

“Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the president said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting,” he charged.

He then went on at length, attacking reporters, particularly one from The New York Times, for tweeting photographs comparing the size of the crowd at Friday’s inauguration unfavorably with Barack Obama’s first inauguration. (That image was retweeted from the National Park Service’s account, prompting a brief Twitter freeze at the Interior Department.)

“Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted,” Spicer continued, because the NPS did not count. (My colleague Robinson Meyer explained how crowd counts at events like the inauguration come about.) He incorrectly characterized ridership statistics provided by WMATA, D.C.’s transit authority.

Then came the big whopper: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.”

Spicer’s statement required dismissing all available evidence: ridership count, eyewitness testimony, independent crowd-counts, and Nielsen television ratings. Spicer cut his teeth at the Republican National Committee as the combative voice of a body often at odds with the media, but even by those standards, his furious insistence on assertions at odds with the evidence were peculiar.

They are, however, emerging as a hallmark of the administration. For days ahead of the inauguration, Trump aides insisted that the president-elect was writing his own inaugural address, without the aid of speechwriters. They went so far as to stage a photograph that purported to show him writing the speech—though the image showed Trump wielding a Sharpie, and some internet sleuths speculated that the desk he was using is typically used a reception desk at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

On Friday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Much of the speech was written by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, two of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, a White House official said.” Why mislead the public about who wrote the speech? After all, the news that Miller would be assisting in writing the address had emerged days ago, and there’s certainly no shame in a president employing speechwriters, nor has the practice dimmed positive reception for past presidential addresses.

Ahead of the inauguration, Trump threw a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial. “This started out tonight being a small little concert, and then we had the idea maybe we’ll do it in front of the Lincoln Memorial,” Trump said in brief remarks. “I don’t know if it’s ever been done before. But if it has, very seldom.” That claim was also ridiculous, whether it was intentionally misleading or simply badly misinformed. There was a huge, widely covered concert at the memorial to kick off Obama’s inauguration festivities eight years ago.

These are only three examples of Trump and his aides offering statements that are not only provably false, but easily checked. (There are plenty more where they came from, like Trump’s claim that Russian hacking was not brought up before the election.)

There was a brief skirmish within the journalism world around the new year, when Wall Street Journal editor Gerry Baker professed wariness about how some of Trump’s statements had been labeled. “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead,” he said. Baker took some heat for that statement in some more progressive parts of the press, but his distinction is real and important.

But how is anyone to view Spicer’s statement as stemming from anything other than a deliberate intent to mislead? The facts are clear, and given that Spicer did not take questions, his main purpose on Saturday must have been to spread falsehoods about crowd size.

Top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet the Press Sunday morning, where Chuck Todd grilled her on the incident. “The presidency is about choices. I’m curious why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size,” Todd asked. Conway first tried to deflect, saying, “I don’t think presidents are judged by crowd sizes, they’re judged by accomplishments.” Fair enough, Todd said—so why lie?

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,” Conway responded.

Todd was flabbergasted by the Orwellian turn of phrase: “Alternative fact are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

There’s still no good explanation for Spicer’s statement, but it fits with a long-running mantra from Trump aides and supporters that there’s no such thing as an objective reality. The question for Trump and his aides is simple: If you’re willing to lie about stuff this minuscule, why should anyone believe what you say about the really big things that matter?

The Trump campaign made a winning wager that enough voters didn’t care that they could get away with that, and the nascent Trump administration seems to be going double-or-nothing on the gamble. Perhaps that’s a winning bet, and objective facts are a thing of the past. But that’s a claim that’s been advanced before, not that long ago, in American history, by a Republican administration whose top aides disdained the “reality-based community.” That administration left office amid an enormous economic recession, and Trump himself called George W. Bush’s war in Iraq “a big fat mistake.” It’s a strange precedent for Trump to adopt at the start of his presidency.

Roe: Can a Play Influence the Abortion Debate?

Roe, which opened at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, is a modern kind of history play, a production that considers a crucial issue in American politics. But its playwright, Lisa Loomer, didn’t expect the timing of Roe to be quite so pointed, coinciding with the arrival of a new president opposed to abortion rights and a vacancy on the Supreme Court. “It’s daunting,” Loomer says. “I feel like the play has become accidentally urgent.”

But Roe isn’t a particularly polemical play, or a deliberate attempt to advocate for one side or another. It frames its story around the two women at the center of Roe v. Wade, the 1971 case that enshrined the legal right to have an abortion in American law: Sarah Weddington, the then-26-year-old attorney who argued on behalf of the plaintiff, and Jane Roe, a.k.a. Norma McCorvey, a young Texan woman in her early 20s who wanted to end her pregnancy. The actors who play the two women serve as both narrators and central characters, telling their own, sometimes opposing versions of the roles they played in a landmark judgment, and how it changed their lives. The case itself is dealt with in just a few minutes: Loomer is much more interested in the larger history of abortion in the U.S., and why, after 40-some years, public opinion on the subject is just as divided as ever.

As Roe opens, abortion rates in the U.S. have fallen to their lowest levels since Roe v. Wade was decided, with both sides divided once again on the reason. Pro-choice advocates argue that access to contraception enabled by the Affordable Care Act has resulted in fewer unplanned pregnancies, while pro-life activists claim that the hundreds of measures to restrict abortion access throughout the last eight years have been successful. It prompts the question: Can a play have an impact? In a fiercely polarized cultural landscape, as even the hundreds of thousands of women descending on Washington to protest a new president are divided on the subject of abortion, can art actually shape history as well as mine it?

In Roe’s first scene, the two primary characters break the fourth wall to introduce the play with all the gusto of ring announcers presenting a boxing match. They will, they explain, present their stories of how Roe v. Wade happened, even if those accounts don’t always entirely match up. Weddington (Sarah Jane Agnew) was just 26 and one of 40 female graduates in her law-school class of 1,600 when she was approached about challenging anti-abortion statutes in the state of Texas.  McCorvey (Sara Bruner) was 23, an unattached lesbian of no fixed abode, and pregnant for the third time when she sought advice from an attorney about having an abortion. The lawyer referred her to Weddington, leading to a meeting between the two women in a Dallas pizza restaurant.

Even in their earliest encounter the two characters break the fourth wall to argue over the details of their meeting (McCorvey insists she never wanted to be a figurehead for a movement and was misled into thinking she might be able to get an abortion despite the timeline of the lawsuit; Weddington implies McCorvey told different versions of how she got pregnant). But McCorvey agrees to be Jane Roe, and Weddington finally gets to argue her case in the Supreme Court in 1971, after McCorvey has given birth and given her child up for adoption. The scene is short but powerful: The play’s director, Bill Rauch, intersperses Agnew’s live arguments as Weddington with recorded audio of the Supreme Court justices who asked questions, including William Rehnquist and Thurgood Marshall.

In framing Roe around Weddington and McCorvey, Loomer gets to explore abortion both as a political issue and as a personal one. And her treatment of it is often uncomfortable. Weddington, attending a consciousness-raising meeting at the beginning of the play with some blissfully clueless friends, furiously describes the various ways women are trying to end their own pregnancies, from drinking Lysol and turpentine to using chopsticks and broken Coke bottles. The graphic language seems intended to dispel assumptions that this is an easy issue for anyone. And by including real-life characters such as the charismatic Flip Benham (Jim Abele), an Evangelical minister and anti-abortion activist, Loomer allows all sides of the various arguments to be heard.

In this sense, Roe is deeply thought-provoking, although Loomer says it isn’t necessarily intended to spur debate. “I think we have a lot of debate in this country, a lot of slogan-slinging, a lot of yelling,” she says. “What I wanted to do was tell a very human story, so that someone on one side could begin to hear the feelings, the thoughts, the story of the other side.” After the play premiered in Oregon last year, she received more than 100 letters from people who’d seen it and who were grateful for its nuanced treatment of such a contentious subject. “I think they were grateful to not be told what to think, but rather to be presented with a story that allowed them to think and allowed them to feel,” she says.

By allowing its characters to break the fourth wall so often, Roe acknowledges that history isn’t finite, and that some have much more power to spell out their versions of the truth than others. Weddington, in the play’s first scene, explains to the audience that history is often defined by factors like sex, race, class, and religion. But this understanding of history also suggests that it can be shaped by information and choices. “The play begins in the present and ends in the present,” Loomer says. “It has a prologue and an epilogue, and I changed that epilogue last month because we’re in a different present now.”

Ultimately, the power of Roe may come down to who sees it. Arena Stage is poised to help in this regard: Its reputation as a forceful regional theater just two miles from the White House means that it frequently hosts members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a regular visitor). In 2015, the theater premiered The Originalist, a play by John Strand about the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and the previous year President Jimmy Carter attended Camp David, a play by Lawrence Wright about Carter’s 1978 efforts to negotiate a Middle East peace treaty. Late last year, Arena announced a new series called Power Plays, dedicated to producing and commissioning works about politics and policy.

Plays like Roe, then, seem intended to directly reach people in power, and Loomer’s thoughtful, well-researched, sometimes surprisingly funny work is a strong primer not just on the history of the abortion debate, but on the people most touched by it. The play acknowledges that influence can take unexpected shapes—in one scene, it’s revealed that Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, was strongly affected by the opinions of his wife and daughter. “As human beings, we are constantly making choices,” Loomer says. Her hope is that works of art and entertainment can help inform those choices, not just with knowledge, but with compassion.

I, Daniel Blake Satirizes a Brutal Bureaucracy

Daniel Blake is a carpenter living in Newcastle, England. He’s 59 years old, he’s recently suffered a heart attack, and his doctor is concerned enough about his health that she’s ordered him not to exert himself as he recovers. A government evaluation, however, has deemed him fit for work and ineligible for disability benefits—an illogical and brutish bureaucratic decision that slowly begins to eat away at his life. Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake is a typical slice of socio-political realism from the legendary director, but it’s tinged with an infuriating, Kafkaesque sense of humor, as Daniel tries to explain his administrative predicament to a legion of unfeeling government employees.

The film is offering a pointed take on the current state of the United Kingdom’s welfare system, one Loach believes is designed to turn people away by making it as humiliating and arcane as possible. But there’s a heightened edge to I, Daniel Blake, an embittered streak of comedy that keeps the otherwise miserable plot from weighing too heavily. Much of that is thanks to Dave Johns, the actor and stand-up comedian who plays Daniel with weary self-awareness. Almost all of Loach’s films are polemical, but the best of them present real humanity alongside their politics, and I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme D’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is one of his best movies in years.

The film caused a huge stir in the U.K., where its depiction of the country’s draconian welfare workers, and its byzantine Department for Work and Pensions, prompted debate at the highest level of government. The last time Loach made a film this explicitly focused on the current state of his country was 2010’s Route Irish (about contractors fighting in the Iraq War), and the approach gives I, Daniel Blake an immediacy that’s been lacking from some of his other recent work. The film’s action, such as it were, is focused on the job centers that Daniel must repeatedly visit to try and plead for his benefits. Meetings that could feel clinical and dull instead become strangely compelling, as they’re rooted in such horrifying authenticity.

The rules and regulations Daniel tries to confront are straight out of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 sci-fi film Brazil. His doctor says he’s sick, but the government deems him well enough to work, demanding that he immediately start looking for jobs or face sanctions on the benefits he’s entitled to. A widowed carpenter who owns a low-tech cellphone and has never used a computer, Daniel is flustered by the reams of forms he’s forced to fill out online. One particularly wrenching scene sees him trying to file an appeal on a library computer and growing increasingly frustrated as his session times out, over and over again.

If it sounds bleak and slow-moving, well, it is (this is a Ken Loach movie, and those are his specialties), but Johns’s performance has a remarkably light touch. His rage at the situation never overflows into unbelievable histrionics. His despair manifests as a sort of gallows humor, with Daniel offering a running sardonic commentary as every single civil servant he meets tells him he’s in violation of some law or regulation. Loach’s film is a sour satire in which the joke is that the real-life system has caught up with the science fiction that mocked it 30 years ago. Viewers are stunned at the things Daniel is told—that a man who just suffered a heart attack is really expected to return to the workforce—and at the same time, it’s sadly believable.

In his trips to the job center, Daniel meets Katie (Hayley Squires), a young single mother of two from London who’s been moved to Newcastle by a government that can no longer afford to house the very poor in the cities they’re from. This character is where the flaws of Loach’s disputatious style are most noticeable. Squires lends a similarly soft, humane touch to Katie, but her storyline spins into more outlandish directions with less time granted to make them feel grounded. Unlike Daniel, she never transcends her symbolism, never feels like a real person, though her situation is an unfortunately common one in a country where a conservative government is trying to roll back many of the core tenets of the social safety net.

Loach’s crucial point is that Daniel’s many opponents in the Department for Work and Pensions are not monsters, merely cogs in a faulty machine. In one of I, Daniel Blake’s most telling scenes, a worker finally takes pity on Daniel as he tries to fill out a form online, hovering over his shoulder and directing him, until she is taken aside by her manager and loudly chastised. If she gives one person special attention, she’s told, then the whole system collapses—better to have unfairness for all, the implication goes. Loach makes his political points with brutal directness, but I, Daniel Blake comes at a particularly brutal time for the world, making it all the more important to see.

The Inauguration, and the Counter-Inauguration

Washington, D.C. — In the middle of the National Mall, on the same spot that had, the day before, hosted revelers for the inauguration of Donald Trump, a crowd of people protesting the new presidency spontaneously formed themselves into a circle. They grasped hands. They invited others in. “Join our circle!” one woman shouted, merrily, to a small group of passersby. They obliged. The expanse—a small spot of emptiness in a space otherwise teeming with people—got steadily larger, until it spanned nearly 100 feet across. If you happened to be flying directly above the Mall during the early afternoon of January 21, as the Women’s March on Washington was in full swing, you would have seen a throng of people—about half a million of them, according to the most recent estimates—punctuated, in the middle, by an ad-hoc little bullseye.

“What is this circle about?” a woman asked one of the circle-standers.

“Nobody knows!” the circle-stander replied, cheerfully.

The space stayed empty for a moment, as people clasped hands and looked around at each other with grins and “what-now?” expressions. And then: A woman ran through the circle, dancing, waving a sign that read “FREE MELANIA.” The crowd nodded approvingly. Another women did the same with her sign. A group of three teenage boys danced with their “BAD HOMRE” placards. The crowd whooped. A woman dressed as a plush vulva shimmied around the circle’s perimeter. The circle-standers laughed and clapped and cheered. They held their phones in their air, taking pictures and videos. They cheered some more.

This was a big-tent protest: a messy, ad-hoc, and joyful coalescence of many different movements.

The Women’s March on Washington began in a similarly ad-hoc manner. The protest sprang to life as an errant idea posted to Facebook, right after Trump won the presidency. The notion weathered controversy to evolve into something that, on Saturday, was funereal in purpose but decidedly celebratory in tone. The march, in pretty much every way including the most literal, opposed the inaugural ceremony that had taken place the day before. One the one hand, it protested President Trump. Its participants wore not designer clothes, but jeans and sneakers and—the unofficial uniform of the event—pink knit caps with ears meant to evoke, and synonymize, cats. It had, in place of somber ritual, a festival-like atmosphere. Instead of pomp and circumstance, people spontaneously broke into dance on a spontaneously formed dance floor.

And yet in many ways, the march was also extremely similar to the inauguration whose infrastructure it had co-opted, symbolically and otherwise, for its own purposes. The Women’s March on Washington shared a setting—the Capitol, the Mall, the erstwhile inaugural parade route—with the ceremonies of January 20. And, following an election in which the victor lost the popular vote, the protest seems to have bested the inauguration itself in terms of (physical) public turnout. During a time of extreme partisanship and division—a time in which the One America the now-former president once spoke of can seem an ever-more-distant possibility—the Women’s March played out as a kind of alternate-reality inauguration: not necessarily of Hillary Clinton, but of the ideas and ideals her candidacy represented. The Women’s March was an installation ceremony of a sort—not of a new president, but of the political resistance to him.

“I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS FILTHY ROTTEN SYSTEM,” read one sign, carried by Laurie Grace, 35, of Philadelphia. She got the quote from Dorothy Day. And she intended it, Grace explained to me, to protest “a system that sort of left me out.”

“We’re told that voting is a sacred right in this country,” Grace said. “But even though Hillary won the popular vote, she still lost. I feel pretty conflicted about a country where that could happen.”

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The Women’s March was, to be sure, also a protest march in an extremely traditional vein: It featured leaders—celebrities, activists, celebrity activists—who gave speeches and offered performances on a stage with the Capitol in its background; its participants held signs, and chanted (“This-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like!,” “No-person-is-illegal!”) and commiserated. It was also traditional in that its participants were marching not for one specific thing, but for many related aspirations. Women’s reproductive rights. LGBTQ rights. Immigration rights. Feminism in general (“FEMALES ARE STRONG AS HELL,” one sign went, riffing off a famous feminist’s Netflix show). The environment (“CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL,” “MAKE THE PLANET GREAT AGAIN”). Science (“Y’ALL NEED SCIENCE”). Facts (“MAKE AMERICA FACT-CHECK AGAIN”). Some signs argued for socialism. Some argued against plutocracy. Some argued for Kindness. Some pled for Peace. Some simply argued that America is Already Great.

This was a big-tent protest, in other words—a messy, joyful coalescence of many different movements. The Women’s March deftly employed, in its rhetoric, the biggest of the big-tent tautologies: The point of this protest wasn’t so much the specific things being protested as it was the very bigness of the crowds who were doing the protesting. This was another way the protest alternate-realitied the presidential inauguration: Just as the official ceremony is meant to celebrate not only the person occupying the presidency, but the presidency itself, the Women’s March was a protest that celebrated protest.

This is what democracy looks like. #WomensMarch #WhyIMarch pic.twitter.com/EjVay17UDV

— Women’s March (@womensmarch) January 21, 2017

And in doing that, it took direct aim at the thing the new president has a record of valuing so highly—crowd sizes, ratings, large-scale approval—and counter-punched. Trump, after all, since the beginning of his presidential candidacy, has made a point of emphasizing the size of the crowds he has been able to attract by way of celebrity’s gravitational pull. He has boasted about the throngs attending his rallies. He has taunted his opponents about the relatively few people who turned out for their events. And Trump’s ascendance to the presidency seems to have done nothing to assuage that impulse: On Friday evening, at the Armed Services Ball, Trump again talked about the large size of the crowd that had come to witness his inauguration. And on Saturday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer used his first official White House briefing to blast the media who had mentioned the size of Trump’s inauguration crowds as compared to those of past presidents, dismissing their assessment as attempts to “minimize the enormous support” that had gotten Trump elected. (Though crowd sizes are notoriously difficult to determine with precision, Trump’s crowds were in fact decidedly smaller than the ones that came out for Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.)

“TRUMP,” read one sign, “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO PISS OFF THIS MANY WOMEN?”

So the new president, in his rhetoric, has emphasized the “pop” in “populism.” And so—counterpunch—the Women’s March has emphasized its own crowd size. It was a march that cared, as much as the new president does, about crowd size, which is to say ratings. The crowds on Saturday spilled over from the march’s stage, where celebrities (America Ferrera, Gloria Steinem, Janelle Monáe, Katy Perry, Ashley Judd, Alicia Keys, Madonna) and activists (Rise’s Amanda Nguyen, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Rhea Suh, Our Revolution’s Erika Andiola, and many others) spoke to the people watching them both in person and on TV; they marched down Independence Avenue, and down Pennsylvania Avenue; they piled onto the steps of the National Gallery of Art; they filled the Mall to capacity. They showed up to sister rallies around the country and the world—in Chicago, in Boston, in New York, Los Angeles. And according to organizers, CNN reported, “the crowds were exponentially larger than expected.”

According to organizers, too: That matters. If the Women’s March was trying to inaugurate a movement on January 21, 2017, the first thing it had to do was to prove that there was a movement to be inaugurated. As one sign read: “TRUMP, DO YOU REALLY WANT TO PISS OFF THIS MANY WOMEN?”

Or, as Raquel Willis, of the Transgender Law Center, told the audience before she began the rest of her speech on the march’s main stage: “I want us to take a second and look around. Look at all these people who are gathered here to take a stand. These are your partners in resistance and liberation.”

Monáe made a similar argument. “This isn’t about me,” the actor and singer said. “This is about all of us fighting back against the abuse of power.”

“All of us.” “Us” is a tricky word in the America of 2017, coming off of an acrimonious campaign, its offenses, on all sides, still fresh. But the Women’s March insisted that the “us” and the “we” are two other things to be reclaimed in the years ahead—two other things that will be at stake in every peaceful transition of power. As Ferrera told the crowd at the beginning of the protest, “The president is not America. His cabinet is not America. Congress is not America. We are America. And we are here to stay.”

Trump Blames his Rift With the CIA on the Media

On his first full day in office, President Donald Trump spoke at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters, standing in front of the Agency’s memorial to its fallen officers,  and sought to mend his tumultuous relationship with Langley. Yet he never said the word “sorry,” to federal intelligence agencies for the many times he’s berated them.

Trump has castigated both the CIA, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over everything from their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s role in Benghazi and her private email server, to their inquiries into hacks on the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails. But in his speech, he sought to blame his rift with the intelligence community on the press, implying the conflict was simply the invention of a hostile media.

The speech started a little before 3:20 p.m., lasted about 20 minutes, and veered from topic to topic. Trump opened by saying he thought the intelligence community were “special, amazing people,” then lamented how the U.S. never won wars anymore (“When I was young we were always winning things in this country”); he brought up ISIS (“It has to be eradicated—off the face of the earth!”); he mentioned the numerous occasions on which he’s appeared on the cover of Time magazine (“I have been on that cover 14 or 15 times”). He seemed to spiral around why he had come, making political jabs at the media to mixed success.

CNN reported that the crowd of intelligence officials were broken into two sections, with the main area full of agency staff, and a separate section in front of the lectern full of senior agency leadership, including agents. There was some applause at times from the all-agency section, CNN reported, but the leadership stood, looking stoic, and did not applaud.

"I am so behind you,” Trump said at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

"There is nobody that feels stronger about the Intelligence Community and the CIA than Donald Trump," he said.

They would “get so much backing” from his administration that they might beg him to stop backing them so much. They might even say, he suggested, “Please, don’t give us so much backing.”

Since winning the election Trump has chosen only to receive intelligence briefings once a week instead of each day, calling them repetitive, and leading some to question whether he held the agencies in much regard. At times, he has praised the intelligence community when they do something he approves of—like reopening their investigation into Clinton’s emails—and scolded them in statements or via Twitter when they do something that might harm his image.

For example, after reports that the intelligence community had concluded that Russia was behind the DNC hacks, which were intended to influence the election in Trump’s favor, Trump denied it. He seemed to take the news personally, as if it meant he’d not won the presidency on his own. In a statement, his transition team said, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

What Trumped seemed to be implying was what he’s said many times before, which is that the agencies responsible for collecting intelligence across the world and keeping the country safe from threat are inept. Earlier this month, after numerous reports that intelligence agencies had linked Russia to hacking the DNC, Trump implied that Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, had better intel than they did.

Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017

As early as last week, in fact, Trump seemed to be picking a Twitter fight with the intelligence community.

Upset over the leak and publication of a private dossier compiled by a former British intelligence official filled with unsubstantiated claims about his connections to Russia, Trump scolded the intelligence community, comparing them to Nazi Germany: "I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. I think it's a disgrace, and I say that ... that's something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do."

It was at that same conference in New York when he acknowledged for the first time that Russia might, possibly, have been behind the DNC hacks.

A few days later and Trump was criticizing the outgoing CIA director John Brennan, who resigned Friday, for comments he made that questioned Trump’s comprehension of Russia’s capabilities and intentions.  

.@FoxNews "Outgoing CIA Chief, John Brennan, blasts Pres-Elect Trump on Russia threat. Does not fully understand." Oh really, couldn't do...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2017

much worse - just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukraine and the build-up of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake News?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2017

All of this had led some to believe there might be a four-year war brewing between Trump and the intelligence community, something that could lead to an unprecedented amount of leaks, departmental fighting, mass flight from intelligence jobs, or weakened intelligence gathering on threats to the country.

Indeed, earlier this month The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s transition team planned to hack the CIA’s budget, rearrange its personnel, and leave it a shell of itself.

It seems the press conference Saturday—though at times rambling—was meant to salve the the wounds Trump has himself created with intelligence agencies. He spoke casually at CIA headquarters, in his typical fashion, winking and joking. Besides, he said, he’s never had anything against the CIA. The entire thing was made up by the press.

“They sort of made it like I had a feud with the intelligence community,” he said, shrugging, as if it were ridiculous to think he’d ever done anything to disparage such “special, amazing people.”