Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 33
December 14, 2016
FAQs on Russian Hacking and the U.S. Election
1. Didn’t we already know about Russia hacking the Democratic National Committee? Why all the fuss right now?
Yes we did. Way back in mid-June, the Democratic National Committee reported an intrusion into its computer network, and the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike publicly blamed Russian hackers after analyzing the breach. In July, after emails stolen from the committee appeared on WikiLeaks, Democratic members of congress also blamed the Russians, with Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook alleging that “It was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton.”
It wasn’t until September that anonymous federal officials confirmed to The New York Times the intelligence community’s “high confidence” of Russian government involvement in the hack, if not the subsequent leak, and leaving doubt as to whether the hacks were “routine cyberespionage” or actually intended to influence the election. And it wasn’t until October that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, went on the record to blame Russia—government actors, not, say, cybercriminals who happened to be Russian—declaring not only that “based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts ... only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” but that they were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Days later, emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta appeared on WikiLeaks.
So as of fall, the United States government had officially blamed Russia for the hacks, and stated that the hacks were intended to interfere with the American election. Until Friday, intelligence officials were not claiming that the Russians wanted specifically to help Trump win, as opposed to undermining faith in the overall process. Then The Washington Post disclosed a “secret CIA assessment”—again described by anonymous officials—declaring it “quite clear” that a Trump presidency was the ultimate goal of the hacks. A Times investigation published Tuesday provided more background on how the hacks actually worked. Yet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has not publicly embraced the CIA’s findings, and the FBI has given a more “ambiguous” picture of Russia’s goals in congressional briefings. Meanwhile, Congress is planning to investigate.
2. Who else has been hacked?
Thomas Rid, writing in Esquire in October, noted that Russia began hacking the U.S. as early as 1996, five years after the demise of the Soviet Union, and added that the DNC hack concealed an even bigger prize for the Russians: the National Security Agency, whose secret files were dumped this August on Github and other file-sharing sites.
Then there is Germany. In May, BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said hackers linked to the Russian government had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, as well as German state computers. In September, Arne Schoenbohm, who heads Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), briefed German lawmakers about Russian hacking. Schoenbohm told Sudduetsche Zeitung, after reports emerged in the U.S. of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, that “[g]iven the background of the American situation, I have to protect our political parties from spying.” Those warnings became more urgent after the U.S. presidential election. Bruno Kahl, the head of the Germany’s foreign intelligence service, told the newspaper last month that Russia could seek to disrupt Germany’s elections next year to create “political uncertainty.” Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term in those elections, said in November after an attack targeted Deutsche Telekom customers that “[s]uch cyber attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.”
Suspected Russian hacking has targeted other countries, as well. In April 2007, websites and servers belonging to the government, banks, and media in the former Soviet republic of Estonia came under a sustained monthlong attack. A U.S. diplomatic cable, published in WikiLeaks, called the Baltic state an “unprecedented victim of the world's first cyber attacks against a nation state.” Similar attacks targeted the former Soviet republic of Georgia a year later, and Ukraine more recently. All three countries have pro-Western leaders that are deeply critical of what they see as Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin.
And prior to perhaps their most high-value target thus far, the DNC, Russian hackers allegedly targeted the World Anti-Doping Agency ahead of the Rio Olympics this summer. WADA had reported a widespread Russian state-run doping program that involved the country’s track-and-field program. That revelation resulted in the Russian track-and-field team being banned from the games. WADA was hacked in apparent response, and the personal information of several athletes, including the Russian whistleblower who alerted WADA to the scandal, was leaked online. It’s worth pointing out that the Russian government has dismissed claims that it is involved.
3. What does “hacking” actually entail?
It depends: Hackers believed to be from Russia have accessed computers and servers belonging to government and political parties in rival countries. In some cases, such as in the DNC or WADA hack, those hacks resulted in the leak of information on websites such as WikiLeaks. In other cases, the attacks focused on national infrastructure: In Ukraine, for instance, according to Wired, hackers targeted the power grid; they then attacked the telephone service so customers couldn’t call to report the outages. When they hit the NSA, hackers posted the agency’s “cyber-weapons” to file-sharing sites, according to Esquire. The hackers don’t just target states and institutions. Frequently, individuals are caught up, as well. On December 9, the Times reported that suspected Russian hackers targeted critics of the country’s government who live overseas by posting child porn on their computers.
4. How solid is the CIA’s case that Russia tried to tilt the election for Trump?
An unnamed official told Reuters on Tuesday that “ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent.” The Post noted this problem in its Friday report, citing “the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladimir Putin and those closest to him.” Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, American intelligence agencies have deprioritized Russia. The Post reported in fall, citing U.S. officials, that the “CIA and other agencies now devote at most 10 percent of their budgets to Russia-related espionage, a percentage that has risen over the past two years,” but is still dwarfed by the Cold War peak of about 40 percent.
As for the actual evidence of intent—which is the only truly new claim as of Friday—what’s publicly available is circumstantial, including Russian state TV’s pushing of Trump’s candidacy, and reports that the Republican National Committee, too, was hacked though suffered none of the same embarrassing leaks as the DNC. (The RNC has denied it was hacked.) All of this was occurring in an international political context in which Trump was one of the most pro-Russian presidential candidates in recent memory, while Vladimir Putin personally blamed Hillary Clinton for inciting protests against his rule when she was secretary of state.
Meanwhile, the denials. Many of Trump’s surrogates have publicly suggested that Russia is the victim of a false-flag operation planned by U.S. intelligence—an assertion that doesn’t appear to be based on any fact in the public realm. Russian officials themselves have rejected the idea they are involved, as have Russian cyber-security experts, one of whom dismissed it as “a classic stereotype of the nineties and early 2000s.” They say that it’s virtually impossible to trace the origin of a hack.
But as Kaveh Waddell explained this week, while it can be difficult to catch the culprit of a hack, it’s by no means impossible. Esquire, in its story, noted that sloppy errors committed by the hackers pointed U.S. intelligence to their whereabouts. Andrei Soldatov, who wrote Red Web, told The Telegraph the Russian government is using its computer industry to hack its targets. “We have maybe the biggest engineer community in the world, and lots of great specialists,” he told the newspaper. “They are not criminals, they are professionals—and they are not bothered or afraid to refuse requests from government agencies.”
5. But Trump says we shouldn’t trust the CIA because they said there were WMD in Iraq, when there weren’t. Shouldn’t we take that history into consideration?
“There's a big difference between Iraq WMD and Russian cyber hacking,” wrote Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert at Stanford, in an email. “For starters, we're talking about different people making the assessments, a different problem to unravel (hidden nuclear capabilities in a foreign country versus cyber attacks on US systems), and a different analysis process. Intelligence analysis was thoroughly revamped after Iraq, as it should have been. But saying that these are same people who brought us Iraq WMD is like saying this year's Golden State Warriors must be terrible, because the Warriors lost so many games in the 90s.”
Which isn’t to say that past intelligence failures writ large have no relevance to today. The relevance is: Intelligence sometimes fails. As Zegart notes: “The best experts didn't predict Trump's win, and that's Americans predicting what Americans will do in an open society with frequent polling. In intelligence, adversaries are working hard and spending billions to hide their activities and deceive us.”
Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Clinton National Security Council staffer who argued for invading Iraq in 2003, said in an interview that Saddam Hussein did a “totally insane” version of this: “Saddam’s whole thinking was, ‘I’m going to get rid of my weapons of mass destruction, basically after 1995, but I can’t tell my people that. I want my people to continue to fear me, and believe that I have this.’ … The U.S., and the rest of the world, frankly … all picks up on the fact that that he is putting it out to all of his people that, ‘Yeah I still have WMD.’ And that strikes me as a really fundamental difference.”
He continued: “The intelligence community certainly can be wrong about these kinds of things, and you do want to take everything with a certain amount of skepticism. That said, it seems like in this case, they’ve found the tracks—that’s kind of the nice thing about cyber, as best as I understand it, is you can actually go back and see the keystrokes … which was not something that we had in Iraq.”
The New Aesthetic of James Harden
Almost a third of the way through the season, James Harden of the Houston Rockets may be the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. The wily guard, known to casual fans for the winter-in-Fairbanks beard he maintains in steamy Texas, is averaging 28.1 points and 11.6 assists per game—the former number good for fourth-best among all players, the latter the best mark in the league. He has led the Rockets to a solid record, 18 wins and seven losses, even though the Houston roster lacks a single complimentary All-Star, much less a superstar troika like the ones en vogue among the NBA’s ruling class. Without question, he is playing the best basketball of his career. Absent Harden, the Rockets could be one of the worst teams in the league; with him, they are one of the six or seven best.
Harden’s improvement this season seems due less to personal growth than to a change in circumstances. Occasionally, over the last couple years, he feuded with the temperamental center Dwight Howard, a former leading man unenthusiastic about his sidekick role in Houston. Howard’s departure this past summer to Atlanta coincided with the arrival of a new coach, Mike D’Antoni, who during the 2000s had fashioned a revolutionary, fast-paced offense in Phoenix. D’Antoni looked at the Rockets with a newcomer’s fresh eyes and settled on a simple tactic: Give Harden the ball as much as he wants it.
It has proven a wise choice, and the next logical step for a franchise dedicated to streamlining the processes of basketball. Daryl Morey, Houston’s general manager, is one of the NBA’s most dedicated students of advanced analytics; his “Moreyball” prizes high-value shots like three-pointers, layups, and free-throws over the artful but inefficient midrange offerings that were trademarks of past stars like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Harden fits Morey’s vision to a T. He drives to the rim, shoots from behind the arc or passes to players stationed there, and annually makes the most free-throws in the league. D’Antoni is entirely on board, allowing Harden unprecedented freedom to hunt for valuable opportunities, old-fashioned tenets of teamwork be damned. The blueprint is realized and Harden is optimized. As the Rockets’ star takes his numerically sound approach on a season-long tour, its effectiveness is not in doubt. Its appeal to fans used to a less rigid style of basketball, on the other hand, still is—though those sentiments are starting to change, as styles across sports bend toward efficiency.
In a profile of Harden published prior to the start of last season, under a sub-head describing his style of play as “ugly,” ESPN’s Pablo S. Torre summed up the widespread distaste for the Rockets’ superstar: “Harden suggests a strapping, 220-pound tax attorney, systematically exploiting the letter of [basketball’s] laws.” A mostly laudatory article published a month ago by Rolling Stone’s Steve McPherson began, “James Harden can be difficult to watch.” Harden may or may not end up the NBA’s MVP, but he is certainly among its most polarizing players.
The gripes about Harden mostly center on his knack for drawing fouls. He has a catalog of maneuvers designed to coax a whistle from a referee, ranging from clever (extending the ball as opponents reach for it so they hit his forearms instead) to cheap (splaying his limbs at the slightest contact, so that you’d think a grenade, not a couple of fingertips, had just hit him). Once, he scored 27 points on a night when he made just two field goals; 22 of those points came at the free-throw line. His first television commercial for Adidas featured a talking head on a mocked-up sports show pontificating above the words, “Trying to Score or Get Fouled?”
Harden is not especially athletic, but he brings to the game an uncanny awareness of space and tempo.
The referee-baiting is really just one component of an approach that can look, at times, like nothing so much as a basketball algorithm. Most Harden plays follow the same script. He stands dribbling beyond the three-point line, another player comes and sets a screen for him, and he attacks. The list of usual outcomes to these one-man forays seems meager to someone used to watching the ball movement of the Golden State Warriors or the Swiss Army skill set of LeBron James. Harden shoots a layup or a three-pointer, gets fouled, or sends the ball to a big man for a dunk or a shooter for a triple. He lets the defenders decide what to guard against and takes advantage of what they don’t. Using this same basic action ad nauseam, the Rockets score 112 points a game, the second-most in the league.
The rote nature of the strategy, though, belies the individual brilliance that makes it work. By NBA standards, Harden is not especially athletic—his body is doughy instead of sculpted, and his speed and leaping ability rate as average—but he brings to the game an uncanny awareness of space and tempo. He predicts where and when defenders will move. He slips passes through the tiniest slivers. He is a masterful dribbler, the ball moving around and between his legs like a needle through cloth, his eyes always scanning the floor. His torso and feet can look like they belong to two men moving in opposite directions; the player guarding him doesn’t know which one to follow, and poof—Harden is gone, dropping the ball through the rim an instant later.
It is beautiful, in its way, even if that beauty takes some attention and patience to access. Fans are getting more and more used to that sort of work, though. If Harden’s skills put him at the forefront of basketball’s evolution, then his aesthetic makes him a stand-in for the stylistic changes across 21st-century sports. Everywhere, old romantic approaches fall to newer, statistically sound ones. In the NFL, running backs—once among football’s most dependable and needed players—matter less as newfangled passing offenses prove more viable. In tennis, Novak Djokovic and his racket like a Gatling gun have overtaken the painterly Roger Federer. Baseball pitchers throw harder than ever, while the ones who get by with slow stuff and guile largely disappear. And Harden’s gift as a basketball player is not in the breadth of his game; it is in his ability to accomplish the same thing with the same methods again and again.
But these changes have not robbed sports of their charms; they have only relocated them. There is something mind-bending in Djokovic’s ability to teleport across a court prepared to take a full swing, and in Tom Brady’s skill at dicing a defense with inch-perfect throws, that compensates for the loss of the former variability. In much the same way, the basketball fan who loved the game for its collaboration might find a new pleasure in the nuance of Harden’s footwork, the almost musical changes of pace that let him breeze through a defense on every play, every night.
In a new Adidas spot, Harden addresses his detractors. “What if I gave you what you wanted?” he says as an alternate-universe montage rolls in which his favorite moves are banned and his young imitators are forced to strip his influence from their own games. “What if we all stopped being creative? You really want that?” The ad asks Harden’s critics to reconsider, to think of him as an innovator instead of an intruder. It gives words to the challenge Harden puts to opponents and fans alike every time he takes the court: to try to keep up with the new thing, because it’s here to stay.
Of Course Rogue One Is Political
All art is propaganda, at least according to George Orwell’s aphorism, but not if Disney’s CEO has anything to say about it. Days before the release of Rogue One, the first spinoff of the company’s prized Star Wars universe, Bob Iger took it upon himself to make something clear. “Frankly, this is a film that the world should enjoy. It is not a film that is, in any way, a political film,” he told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s premiere. “There are no political statements in it, at all.” Take a seat, George—is the first truly apolitical film finally upon us?
Of course not. Rogue One leans into the broad political strokes that George Lucas set out when initially creating Star Wars in 1977. It’s a tale of rebellion against a totalitarian government, of guerrilla fighters striking a blow against uniform regiments of stormtroopers and the brutal dictator they serve. The idea that such sentiments would be remotely controversial is indicative of just how much the 2016 election has seeped into every aspect of pop culture, whether Iger likes it or not. Rogue One is a tale of good guys and bad guys, just as Star Wars always has been. Disney’s fear is that some audience members might think they’re being lumped in with the losing side.
This particular storm in a teacup was prompted by a (now-deleted) tweet from the Rogue One screenwriter Chris Weitz, who called the Empire a “white supremacist (human) organization” and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Weitz later apologized for “connecting an innocent escape to ugly politics,” but momentum built after a Twitter user spread the false rumor that Rogue One had been rewritten to add “anti-Trump” scenes. It was the kind of low-level viral absurdity that trends online partly because so many social-media users begin to mock it, but the resulting fuss was enough to prompt denials from Weitz and Iger.
What was more absurd was Iger’s bizarre phrasing—the idea that Rogue One was not “in any way” political. One assumes he meant that at no point does the film’s hero Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones) deliver a treatise against Trump’s electoral platform, nor are any X-Wings spotted sporting “I’m With Her” bumper stickers. But the film certainly has a more forceful edge to it than last year’s Star Wars entry The Force Awakens (which was also subject to a bogus online boycott). Set right before Lucas’s original 1977 film, Rogue One depicts the Empire at its most brutal, a militaristic police state intent on suppressing dissent with its new “super-weapon,” the Death Star (which Erso and her team is trying to sabotage).
All of these elements—the Empire, the bold saboteurs, the Death Star, the villainous Darth Vader—appeared in the 1977 Star Wars, and at no point was a studio executive called on to assure audiences that their politics would not be decried onscreen. Lucas talks about how the Empire is a stand-in for Nazi Germany on his Empire Strikes Back DVD commentary, but his more recent Star Wars entries were more nakedly political. In 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, as the evil Emperor seizes power by declaring a state of emergency, the hero Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) remarks, “So this is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause.” Later, as he turns to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) rants, “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy!”
Lucas was up-front at the time about the parallels between the final prequel film and the George W. Bush administration’s war in Iraq. “We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction,” he said at Revenge of the Sith’s premiere. “The parallels between Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.” He then added, “As you go through history, I didn’t think it was going to get quite this close. So it’s just one of those recurring things ... Maybe the film will waken people to the situation.”
There were the same vague murmurings of a boycott at the time (the film, as with all Star Wars films, was a huge hit). But the difference between Lucas’s public dissent and Iger’s resolute denial of any political slant is stark, especially since the former was directed at a sitting president, while Rogue One’s controversy was sparked by the mere notion of denouncing “white supremacy.” Put the viral threats of boycotts aside—Rogue One will make hundreds of millions of dollars in its opening week, as these blockbusters always do. It’s that shift toward the apolitical that seems the most depressing, even if it’s for the sake of commerce rather than art.
Anyone can still read whatever they want into Rogue One, of course; Iger is simply denying the idea that the film was made with any anti-Trump intent. But there’s perhaps nothing more telling about the tricky rhetorical line he’s trying to walk than his remarks about the film’s cast. An underlying thread to the online unease about Rogue One also has to do with its diverse cast (which, outside of the villains, is made up largely of actors of color) and the gender of its lead hero. Iger acknowledged that, saying the film “has one of the greatest and most diverse casts of any film we have ever made and we are very proud of that, and that is not a political statement, at all.” In short, Rogue One deserves to be celebrated, but only if that celebration is entirely divorced from anything that might give reason to offend. Ironically, by insisting on the neutrality of the film, Iger ignored another fact: Declaring that something isn’t political is, in itself, political.
Democrats: Trump Must Divest From His Hotel or Breach His Lease
Updated on December 14 at 12:23 p.m.
The question right now isn’t whether Donald Trump faces a welter of conflicts of interest. It’s how extensive they are, how much the public will learn, and whether there’s any recourse.
In most cases, so far, there seems to be little leverage to force Trump to disclose anything or to divest himself, as I wrote this morning. But several House Democrats allege in a letter released Wednesday that the new Trump Washington D.C. Hotel might be one. The hotel is housed in the old General Post Office building, which is owned by the federal government and managed by the General Services Administration. In 2013, long before his presidential campaign began, Trump signed a 60-year, $180 million lease to redevelop the building as a hotel and commercial center.
Related Story
Has Trump's Election Breached His D.C. Hotel Lease?
As Steven Schooner and Daniel Gordon pointed out in a detailed piece in Government Executive, an Atlantic sister publication, Trump’s lease included one important clause: “No … elected official of the Government of the United States ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom...” In other words, Trump can have his hotel, or he can have the White House, but he cannot have both.
On Wednesday, Democratic Representatives Elijah Cummings, Peter DeFazio, Andre Carson, and Gerry Connolly sent a letter to the administrator of the GSA, Denise Roth, on the matter. They say that Roth sent the deputy commission of GSA’s Public Buildings Service to brief them. They write:
Most importantly, the Deputy Commissioner informed our staff that GSA assesses that Mr. Trump will be in breach of his lease agreement the moment he takes office on January 20, 2017, unless he fully divests himself of all financial interests in the lease for his Washington, D.C. hotel. The Deputy Commissioner made clear that Mr. Trump must divest himself not only of managerial control, but of all ownership interest as well.
They add, “The Deputy Commissioner confirmed repeatedly during the briefing that GSA reads this provision as we do.” They say that the deputy commissioner informed them that GSA had attempted to inform Trump’s team of the impending violation but had received no communication. They also request a collection of documents, including the lease.
But in a statement released around noon, GSA pushed back on the Democrats’ claims:
GSA does not have a position that the lease provision requires the President-elect to divest of his financial interests. We can make no definitive statement at this time about what would constitute a breach of the agreement, and to do so now would be premature. In fact, no determination regarding the Old Post Office can be completed until the full circumstances surrounding the President-elect’s business arrangements have been finalized and he has assumed office. GSA is committed to responsibly administering all of the leases to which it is a party.
What’s interesting is what the statement does and doesn’t do. It doesn’t definitively reject the idea that Trump might be in breach of the contract if he becomes president; it simply says it’s too soon to tell. The statement does throw someone under the bus: Either the deputy commissioner (still unnamed) spoke prematurely or incorrectly, or else the House Democrats are misrepresenting what they are told. Presumably GSA is making preparations for January 20 and won’t begin its assessment then, so the deputy commissioner’s reported explanation may (or may not) reflect the preliminary view held by GSA’s lawyers. GSA did not make any comment on the claims that the Trump transition team had been ignoring communications.
The Trump transition team also did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Reuters’ Emily Stephenson reported that a spokesperson said the matter would come up at a press conference Trump has said he will hold addressing his business conflict some time in January. Trump originally planned to hold the press conference on Thursday, but then suddenly cancelled it on Monday, citing a busy schedule.
While ethics experts point to a range of ethical conflicts for Trump, none is quite so glaring as the gleaming new hotel, just a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause mandates that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Yet foreign diplomats have already begun lining up to stay at the hotel and conduct business there, reasoning that it’s wise to get into the good graces of the president-elect by giving him custom.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’ ” one Asian diplomat told The Washington Post.
Trump has said that as president, his business will do no new deals (a puzzling statement), and that Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, who are currently executive vice presidents, will run the business, while Ivanka, another EVP, detaches herself from the company to advise her father. But as the House Democrats note, this is unlikely to solve any sort of problem. Ivanka Trump was heavily involved in the work on the D.C. hotel and is also working on the Trump transition team, which has reportedly ignored all communication from GSA.
Nor are Trump’s adult sons distancing themselves from politics in preparation to run the business. Politico reports today that Donald Jr., an avid hunter, was involved in selecting Ryan Zinke, a Montana representative, as his father’s nominee for secretary of the interior.
This is the problem with any attempt to unwind Trump the politician from Trump the businessman. His political appeal is built in large part on his business empire, which he has taken to be voter sanction for maintaining all of his conflicts of interest. His business, meanwhile, is not a traditional large company, but instead an extremely lucrative licensing business run almost entirely by Trump and his children. The company sells the Trump brand and depends on having Trump figureheads, and Donald Trump, as I wrote today, can’t divest his surname.
GSA’s response to the letter offers Trump some breathing room, at least up to Election Day, at which point the question becomes live, although Democrats are sure to wield it as a political bludgeon between now and then. But Trump has several options. He seems unlikely to face much resistance from Republicans in Congress who might conduct oversight; they have indicated they have little interest in pressing the president-elect. First, time is on his side. The administrator of the GSA is appointed by the president, so if he can delay an outcome, Trump could presumably install new management at GSA that could reach a different legal conclusion about how to read the lease. Second, Trump could choose to litigate, a favorite tactic of his in the business world, where lawsuits can be used to wait out and grind down adversaries.
The letter claims that the deputy commissioner said the legal decisions about the lease were made by career staff who are insulated from political pressure. But Trump has already shown little regard for such rules, trying to get the Department of Energy to involved in climate-change work. What happens after January 20 will show just how good that insulation is.
House Democrats Letter on GSA and Trump Hotel (PDF)
House Democrats Letter on GSA and Trump Hotel (Text)
The Best Television Episodes of 2016
The Atlantic’s editors and writers pick their favorite 2016 moments from Fleabag, You’re the Worst, High Maintenance, The Good Place, and more. (Just to be clear, spoilers abound.)
Atlanta , “ Value ”
Guy D'Alema / FX
One of the best things to happen in the world of Peak TV has been shows going out of their way to emphasize the characters who are not the stars. “Value,” in a series in which every episode is a legitimate contender for “best,” stands out, in particular, in regards to that intentional empathy. The episode belongs to Van; here, the woman who had thus far been defined in relation to Earn—as his on-again, off-again girlfriend, patient and long-suffering, and also as the mother of his young daughter—gets her due. And, powerfully, as herself. Things start out simply: Van has an obnoxiously fancy dinner with an obnoxiously fancy friend; the friend talks her into some post-dinner weed; only afterward will Van find out that the school where she works has selected the following day for employee drug-testing. The remainder of “Value” finds Van trying, with equal parts desperation and entrepreneurialism, to pass the test. It’s an effort that affords “Value” not just impressively quiet comedy, but that also works as a metaphor—for the arbitrariness of rules, and for the difficulty of staying afloat in a world that can be so determined to weigh people down.
Bojack Horseman , “Fish Out of Water”
Netflix
“Fish Out of Water” (better known as “the underwater episode”) is the rare Bojack installment that’s easy to appreciate as a standalone. It features a single arc: The equine protagonist must make his way to the premiere of his new film, a Secretariat biopic, at a prestigious undersea festival. The episode starts out fairly normally, but after around minute three there’s a dramatic, yet nearly imperceptible, shift: The dialogue disappears. What follows is a gentle, beautifully animated watercolor fantasia that channels Charlie Chaplin and Lost in Translation to explore the ways people try, and often miserably fail, to connect with one another. There are enough visual gags to make up for the lack of verbal ones, and the score does a muscular job of modulating the pace and mood. It’s a testament to the show’s creative team that, for a series that derives so much power from an obsession with language, the best episode doesn’t need many words at all.
Broad City , “ Co-Op ”
Comedy Central
In “Co-op,” Abbi and Ilana, the best friends-and-odd couple-and-also-platonic life partners of Broad City, finally do the inevitable: They switch places. Ilana has to complete a shift at her Brooklyn co-op (it’s her final day to do so before, yep, the current moon cycle ends); she has a doctor’s appointment, though, that conflicts with the shift. Abbi agrees to fill in for her friend—but, the co-op rules being uncooperatively strident, she ends up having to fill in not just for Ilana, but as her. And Ilana, meanwhile, will end up impersonating Abbi. Abbi’s Ilana is better than Ilana’s Abbi—Abbi, as her friend, wears a mesh crop top and fondles produce and merrily yas queens her way around the co-op—but the quality of the impersonations doesn’t, in the end, much matter. The point of this particular Freaky Friday is the friendship it involves—one so fierce that it overcomes even the comically massive differences between the two women who make it what it is.
The Chris Gethard Show , “One Man’s Trash”
Fusion
A green dumpster sits in the middle of The Chris Gethard Show’s stage. Inside it, Gethard tells us, is something special—and if viewers calling in can guess, he’ll open the dumpster and reveal what it is. For the first half of “One Man’s Trash,” guests Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas gleefully try to disrupt proceedings, cackling at Gethard’s obvious discomfort. Then, he lets them look inside the dumpster, and without hyperbole, the expression on their faces after peeking is one of the TV highlights of the year. “One Man’s Trash” shows off everything that’s special about Gethard’s anarchic talk show, now in its second season on Fusion: It turns a freewheeling late-night comedy hour into a thrilling race against time. What’s in the dumpster? You’ll have to watch to find out.
Documentary Now, “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken”
Rhys Thomas/IFC
Each of Documentary Now’s spoof mini-movies is its own little masterpiece, but there was no half-hour of television as emotionally fulfilling, as perfectly plotted, and as simply told as “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken,” a spoof of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Written by Seth Meyers, the episode lovingly mocks every food-porn trope while digging into the human drama of a son (Fred Armisen) desperately trying to live up to the example of his father (Hector Elias), an acclaimed, though very rustic, chef. It’s wry and funny throughout, but the episode’s final five minutes transcend parody; ridiculous as it sounds, Juan Likes Rice and Chicken is a genuinely powerful, moving little tale of fathers and sons.
Fleabag , “Episode Four”
Amazon Prime Video
Fleabag is about the best argument you’ll find for brevity in a TV miniseries: You can watch the whole thing in under three hours, but somehow within that space the show houses the narrative arc and measured character development of a much longer work. In the fourth episode (no official title), Fleabag and her sister head off to a women’s retreat in the countryside. There’s no wi-fi, only spartan accommodations, and the “mindfulness” activities consist of doing menial labor in complete silence. Meanwhile, a group of men staying at the same hotel scream obscenities at sex dolls dressed up as professional women. The episode’s insight into how society conditions men and women to behave is sneakily acute, and a scene at the end where a bank manager (Hugh Dennis) opens up to Fleabag about his state of despair is one of the most poignant moments I’ve seen on TV this year.
Game of Thrones , “ The Winds of Winter ”
Helen Sloan / HBO
With the season-seven finale, the Stark house words have been robbed of their ominous power: Winter isn’t coming, winter is here. Game of Thrones’s season finales always deliver, and this year was no different, with an especially epic episode that saw the (literal) fall of a king, the rise of a new queen, a shaky peace in the North, a series-defining revelation about a bastard’s birth, the poetic murder of a mass murderer, and a sea crossing that viewers waited seven years for. And, of course, it saw the arrival of the actual apocalypse in the form of ice zombies. But even apart from all the satisfying plot movement, “The Winds of Winter” made for breathtaking television, thanks to the magic of the director Miguel Sapochnik and the composer Ramin Djawadi, whose work on the opening sequence was nothing short of virtuosic.
Gilmore Girls, “Fall”
Saeed Adyani / Netflix
The first three episodes of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life were distinctly patchy, with dropped plot threads, interminable musical moments, and characters who seem hell-bent on proving they’d never been all that sympathetic to begin with. But “Fall” made me forgive everything, mostly because it crystallized everything that made the show great. Exhibit A: Lorelai and Luke, finally getting their (official, legal) happy ending. Exhibit B: Stars Hollow, made even more of an unrealistic fairyland than usual thanks to Kirk’s skills with Christmas lights. Exhibit C: a moment of emotional catharsis for Lorelai after losing her father, prompted by a wackadoo plot that made fun of every woman who was ever in a book club. Exhibit D: Emily Gilmore, independent woman, whale whisperer. Exhibit E: Sookie. Altogether, despite Logan’s best efforts to ruin everything with his costume club for Scott Disick wannabes, it was more than enough.
The Girlfriend Experience, “Blindsided”
Starz
There is something about watching The Girlfriend Experience that feels intensely claustrophobic, never more so than in the ninth episode when Christine realizes a tape of her having sex with Jack has been sent from her own email account to all of her contacts. As it rebounds around the office, and Christine is forced to listen to her coworker’s whispered reactions while fielding a series of increasingly menacing phone calls, “Blindsided” adopts the trappings of classic horror, with Christine being attacked from all sides by an intangible enemy. What makes it fascinating, though, is how untrustworthy her responses are. Her initial tears in David’s office give way to frustration and anger; her eventual panic attack feels like a convenient escape route. Throughout the episode, she maintains enough composure to record interactions with her phone, a reminder of the show’s theme of the currency of private moments.
Girls, “The Panic in Central Park”
March Schafer / HBO
The best episodes of Girls are usually ones that break the show’s conventions, either by zooming out of Brooklyn (all the way out to Tokyo, in Shoshanna’s case) or by examining individual characters more closely. “The Panic in Central Park,” inspired by the 1971 Al Pacino movie The Panic in Needle Park, focuses entirely on Marnie. Although she’s never been the show’s most sympathetic character, the episode’s unusual structure allows audiences to appreciate her vulnerability for the first time, as well as her toughness. Encountering her ex-boyfriend Charlie on the street, Marnie gets swept up in a charade that involves dressing up in a shiny red gown, masquerading as a prostitute, stealing a rowboat, running out on Charlie after finding evidence of his drug addiction, and realizing her marriage is over. The episode has moments of remarkable beauty (Marnie’s face underwater) and surreal humor (the scene in the communal showers at Charlie’s squat), but its unusual format allows both Lena Dunham and Allison Williams to showcase their strengths.
The Good Place , “ Someone Like Me as a Member ”
Ron Batzdorff / NBC
The Good Place may be one of the more high-concept network sitcoms currently on air. It centers on Eleanor (Kristen Bell), a morally shady person who dies and, due to a bit of bad cosmic filing, ends up in a non-denominational heaven. “Someone Like Me as a Member,” in particular, showcases the show’s weirdly specific humor and near-philosophical commitment to world-building. Though the regular “good place” cast is incredible, the representatives from “the bad place” steal this midseason finale. There’s a delightfully douchey demon-in-charge played by Adam Scott, who calls Eleanor “sweetheart” while telling her to smile and who says things like “Swear to Bieber.” There’s his hell posse, who snort time instead of cocaine and who, in perhaps one of my favorite comedic moments of 2016, do karaoke to hate speech (“Let’s do the Nixon tapes, that’s my jam!”). There’s even mention of a divine being who oversees both realms, further teasing the mystery of what January will bring. For those who haven’t seen The Good Place yet, the winter hiatus is as ideal a time as any to catch up.
High Maintenance, “Grandpa”
David Russell / HBO
In the jump from web series to HBO comedy, High Maintenance extended its radical empathy beyond the typical humans of New York to a shaggy dog and—perhaps even more surprisingly—his Republican owner relocated from the Midwest. A short film shot largely from behind the ears of a slobbery half-poodle named Gatsby, the effervescent and surprisingly moving “Grandpa” celebrates the emotional intelligence of Man’s Best Friend without wandering too close to talking-pets territory. After falling in puppy-love with Yael Stone’s free-spirited dog walker, Gatsby meets with heartbreak that feels as devastating as any human being’s. But in the end, all dogs go to heaven, and this dog’s is in the urban social tapestry that High Maintenance so loves.
Horace and Pete , “Episode 3”
Fig Newton Productions
Horace and Pete, the stagey, independent drama that the comedian Louis C.K. funded out of his own pocket and dropped online with no hint or warning, contained a handful of the best TV performances of the year. But none were more arresting than those in “Episode 3,” which centers on a conversation between Horace (C.K.) and his ex-wife Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), in which she tells him that she’s having an affair with her new husband’s father. Told almost entirely in monologue, the 43-minute episode rarely breaks from Metcalf’s face as she essays her guilt, while simultaneously confessing that she cannot end the dalliance. Metcalf’s work in the episode is extraordinary—and its unusual formatting foreshadowed just how often C.K.’s new show would break traditional TV storytelling modes.
The Night Of , “The Beach”
Barry Wetcher / HBO
Appreciating the beauty of HBO’s methodical deconstruction of the justice system means embracing the frustrating fact that smart people often make very bad decisions. So it is for Nazir (Riz Ahmed), the otherwise sympathetic college student whose wrong-place, wrong-time circumstances in the show’s first installment are made much worse by his own actions. You’d be forgiven for yelling at the guy through the screen; the super-tense first act of the premiere feels a lot like a horror film anyways. But the real thrill of the episode—and of the show—comes after the inevitable bloodshed. As the bureaucratic machinery of law and order begin to clamp down on Naz, it slowly becomes clear how an inhuman system can result from the sum efforts of many humans—each of them, of course, able to make mistakes.
Orange Is The New Black, “The Animals”
Netflix
“This place crushes anything good,” Caputo tells Bayley in “The Animals,” warning him to leave Litchfield before he becomes a monster. His words manifest in awful, literal form at the end of the episode when Bayley inadvertently crushes Poussey to death in the midst of a protest in the cafeteria. It’s the ultimate distillation of the prison’s increased cruelty toward the inmates: Just as the women have made (loaded) peace with each other in their mission to bring down Piscatella and MCC, they’re reminded of how powerless they actually are. Orange Is the New Black juggles humor and darkness throughout its fourth season, but “The Animals” is a work of profound tragedy, asserting the vulnerability and humanity of the inmates in the face of heartbreaking loss.
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story , “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”
Ray Mickshaw / FX
It’s fair to say that The People v. O.J. Simpson played a meaningful role in rehabilitating the public image of Marcia Clark, the attorney who prosecuted—and lost—the biggest murder trial of the 20th century. Clark’s list of perceived sins ran long: Her incompetence. Her naivete. Her unlikeability. Her hair. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” does a masterful, albeit condensed, job of showing just how much sexism shaped the way Clark was seen in the ’90s, and went on to be remembered today. In depicting the ruthless media scrutiny of her appearance, her guilt over balancing career with a family, and the casual courtroom mockery she faced, the Marcia-centric episode humanizes its subject in a way that makes Clark’s treatment seem both appalling and completely familiar, especially to female viewers. Sarah Paulson’s terrific performance rendered Clark not as a saint, but as a determined, intelligent lawyer whose flaws came to overshadow her strengths in large part because of her gender. Though the series didn’t have a single weak episode, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” is arguably the most memorable.
RuPaul’s Drag Race, “RuPaul’s Book Ball”
LogoTV
RuPaul’s Drag Race is all about the fun of inventing a new identity, but as the contestant pool winnows down at the end of each season, the show’s deeper greatness reveals itself because the actual people behind the costumes and bitchery also do. This time out, the crucial final-five round provided so many moments of realness—both confrontational and joyful realness—that the producers had no choice but to let the episode run long. A simmering feud between a would-be Vogue model and a Britney Spears lookalike, centered on the issue of gluing down one’s eyebrows (who can’t relate, right?), questioned the nature of drag itself. Guest judges David and Amy Sedaris bought smart humor to an unusually literary final challenge. And the constants, asked to render their life stories in fashion, poignantly and playfully paid tribute to their first female role models: their mothers.
Saturday Night Live , “Tom Hanks/Lady Gaga”
Will Heath / NBC
Sometimes, Saturday Night Live airs the kind of instant-classic sketch you know you’ll want to watch over and over again for years to come, making the whole 90 minutes of (often uneven) comedy worth it. SNL’s Tom Hanks episode, which aired October 22, had two such sketches back-to-back. First, there was a Trump voter-themed edition of “Black Jeopardy,” a surprisingly searing subversion of the sketch’s traditional formula that only seems more meaningful post-election. Then, there’s David S. Pumpkins, the mysteriously confident halloween showman about whom much ink has already been spilled. It was an altogether terrific night—Hanks’s monologue (where he took on the role of “America’s Dad” and addressed the nation in a father-son heart-to-heart) was great, Leslie Jones’s Weekend Update segment about getting hacked was extraordinary—but let’s be honest. We’re still in the weeds with David Pumpkins.
Silicon Valley, “ Meinertzhagen's Haversack ”
John P. Fleenor / HBO
Like Veep, Silicon Valley is a special comedy that has mastered the art of the pivot: Just when you think the plot has hit a dead end, the dramatic potential of a situation depleted, the writers surprise you by going in an even more fascinating direction. As of season three, the series protagonist Richard and his tech start-up, Pied Piper, had hit almost every conceivable high and low—and “Meinertzhagen’s Haversack” takes that narrative whiplash and uses it to drive a mini heist thriller. The episode is classic Silicon Valley: brutally, often obscenely funny, as its characters fumble their way around a high-stakes corporate landscape. There are invocations of British military history and strategy, plans to devise an illegal skunkworks, political backstabbing, and, yes, dramatic reversals of fate. Topping off the intrigue are some of the most inspired jokes of the season (like one inspirational speech that begins, “When George Washington founded a little startup we’ve come to know as these United States of America, and he was tired of getting shit from his CEO, the King of England…”).
Stranger Things , “The Weirdo on Maple Street”
Curtis Baker / Netflix
In its second episode, Stranger Things secured its status as the TV delight of the summer by making clear its ’80s kitsch buffet really was going to get strange—and scary. In “The Weirdo on Maple Street,” the mysterious girl known as Eleven reveals her powers of telepathy and, more strikingly, its side effect: a bloody nose. A teenage pool party, documented by a creepy/compelling cameraman, seems to be going the way of any other teen comedy’s until a monster brings about what might be the most iconic TV tragedy of 2016. Most terrifyingly, Winona Ryder’s at-wits-end character communes with her missing son over a scratchy telephone connection—until the walls start to move. The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” provides a nicely incongruous soundtrack to that scene; the freakiest twist of all is how Joyce Byers answers Mick Jones’s question.
This Is Us , “ Pilgrim Rick ”
Ron Batzdorff / NBC
This Is Us is a wonderfully cheesy drama—I mean that entirely as a compliment—and “Pilgrim Rick” finds the NBC show at both its most dramatic and its most cheesy. The episode, as the rest of the series does, doubles through time: One of its stories is set in the late ’70s, as the Pearson family is preparing to go to the grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving; the other takes place in the present day, as the family is meeting up, once again, for holiday celebrations. The 2016 version shows the Pearsons’ unique Thanksgiving traditions (involving, among other things, the consuming of hot dogs and the unspooling of a ball of yarn and the ceremonial viewing of Police Academy 3); the ’70s-set storyline explains where all those traditions came from. It’s an elegant arrangement that gives every member of This Is Us’s excellent ensemble cast time to shine, and that embodies the best of the show’s animating idea: While family may not be the people we have chosen for ourselves, they are the ones we can choose, again and again, to come back to.
Transparent , “Exciting and New”
Amazon Prime Video
The supposedly fun thing David Foster Wallace said he’d never do again makes for the setting of a very fun—and typically moving—Transparent episode definitely worth watching again. On a tropical cruise, the original Pfefferman matriarch, Shelly, snaps at her family’s indifference to her and spends her vacation being pampered by her butler—or as she calls him, “the gay who comes with the room.” The others have their own existential misadventures at sea, with Maura reaching a new level of self-acceptance and deciding to hurl her body padding overboard—but then opting for a trash can so as not to pollute. And though the family’s effort at ceremonial spiritual healing fails, in the season’s delirious final moments Shelly emerges from her cocoon with a performance of a ’90s pop cover that delivers the much-needed message that everything is going to be fine, fine, fine.
Veep , “ Inauguration ”
Lacey Terrell / HBO
Veep is impressively cynical—about Washington, about its institutions, about the people who make it what it is—and “Inauguration” might be its most cynical episode yet. But that is, sort of, a good thing! Selina Meyer has now become, after a bit of good fortune, the president of the United States; she is also, like most of the characters who populate the HBO show, not very good at her job. She made a big decision about a bank bailout based, too much, on her banker boyfriend; she sent a sext from the presidential Twitter account; she tried to blame the whole thing on Chinese hackers. The question that animated Veep’s fantastically acerbic fifth season was whether Meyer, the politician who had been successful in large part because she had been lucky, could be re-elected president on her own terms. And “Inauguration” offers, finally, an answer—and a high degree of comeuppance. It’s not at all a happy ending, but it’s a just one; and in Veep, as in the city whose story it tells, “just endings” are as remarkable as they are rare.
The X-Files , “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster”
Ed Araquel / FOX
Like so many recent revivals of TV classics, The X-Files had a lot on its shoulders. Coming back for just six episodes after 14 years, could it erase the many painful memories of the dreary later seasons of the sci-fi classic? Of course not—almost every new episode was riddled with flaws, and in typical fashion, it ended up asking more questions than it answered. But for one exceptional hour, The X-Files recaptured the magic, in a monster-of-the-week special that spoke to the show’s humor, its penchant for breaking the fourth wall, and, of course, the undeniable chemistry between its two leads. In all, The X-Files season 10 was a letdown. But “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” may have been special enough to justify the whole thing.
You’re the Worst , “ Twenty-Two ”
Byron Cohen / FX
Traditionally, it was when a sitcom was running out of other ideas that it resorted to the multi-perspective episode. The episode would go, usually, like this: A thing happens; one character remembers it one way; the other character remembers it another way; Rashomonic lols ensue. “Twenty-Two” is one such episode. But since You’re the Worst is a traditional sitcom only in the most superficial sense, it’s fitting that its take on the cliche would be sensitively told, beautifully rendered, and emotionally revelatory. “Twenty-Two” grafts the point of view of Edgar, the best friend of the comically self-absorbed Jimmy, onto the action of the show’s previous episode—and, in that, it lays bare how cruel Jimmy and his fellow narcissists can be when it comes to their treatment of the people who have the misfortune not to be them. The episode follows Edgar as he struggles and suffers and reaches a literal rock bottom—and, then, in a Hollywood twist, finds a small but richly deserved redemption. I won’t spoil the episode’s ending for you, but I will say that the final, magical scene of “Twenty-Two” has done something a sitcom has rarely been able to: It has haunted me, in the best of ways, long after I turned off the television.
December 13, 2016
Trevor Noah Turns to President Obama for Reassurance
As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition unfolds, with new twists and turns every morning, the waning days of the Obama administration have played out in curious parallel, a sort of melancholy off-Broadway production to the gaudy, bizarre spectacle of Trump Tower. President Obama’s farewell conversation with the Daily Show host Trevor Noah Monday night focused on many of his administration’s accomplishments, and was framed by the obvious respect that Noah, a biracial African comedian raised by his mother and grandmother, has for them. But the discussion had the same tinge of genuine fear that has characterized other recent interviews with the president, related specifically to one looming question: What happens now?
The president’s historic legacy is in so many ways secure. But over the course of their 20-minute conversation, he and Noah touched on signature pieces that now seem under threat, specifically Obamacare, progress on race relations, and the country’s geopolitical standing in the world. It was a sober meeting, reflective of Noah’s clear desire not to imitate the more skeptical, jabbing style of his predecessor Jon Stewart, but to instead position himself as a late-night host who will often choose to swerve away from an easy laugh in favor of a more even-handed dialogue.
As it stood, there was barely time for Noah to crack a joke, considering that he had actual breaking news to ask the president about: the CIA’s confirmation that Russia-backed hackers had worked to sway the election in Trump’s favor. There, as he did time and time again throughout the interview, Obama reassured viewers that the next four years might not be what they imagine. The Russian efforts to disrupt the U.S. election are nothing new, he noted. “What they did here, hacking some emails and releasing them, is not a particularly fancy brand of espionage,” he said, saying the media’s “obsession” with the leaked emails was more troubling, especially since they “didn’t have any explosive information in them.” Noah, nodding quietly, tried to interject with a joke—“The risotto was interesting,” referencing John Podesta’s widely reported cooking skills—but Obama blew right past his comment without a smile.
The rest of the conversation was similarly glum and focused on the present. Rather than merely championing the benefits of healthcare reform, the president turned to the camera and urged people to sign up, assuring them that they will get at the very least one year of coverage before whatever happens next. The implicit threat of a Trump presidency to the work of the Obama administration lurked in every exchange on the segment, from healthcare to climate change policies to general respect for the country’s intelligence agencies.
There’s something fascinating in the tight line Obama has decided to walk in addressing the incoming administration, never resorting to charged language and instead repeating the measured advice he reportedly offered the president-elect in their first meeting. “If you’re not getting [the intelligence agencies’] perspective, their detailed perspective, then you are flying blind,” he said of the daily briefings that Trump has publicly declined to receive. “We’ve seen in the past where there was political spin on intelligence ... and you end up making bad mistakes.”
It’s a powerful refrain: “Reality doesn’t go away,” Obama told Noah.
Before the election, Obama’s faith in his legacy seemed partly rooted in his faith in the American electorate that delivered him to office, as he told Ta-Nehisi Coates and repeated on the campaign trail. Now, that faith seems more rooted in the simple fact that Washington’s bureaucracy is difficult to cut through. He repeated the “Federal government is an aircraft carrier, not a speedboat, turning it is hard” line to Noah that he’s floated in other interviews when asked about any repeal of Obamacare. When asked about climate change, he reminded Noah that no matter what the change in policy, “that’s still happening ... if some streets in Miami that are a mile or two from where the President-elect has a golf course are seeing flooding on sunny days ... that’s still going to have to be dealt with one way or another.”
It’s a powerful refrain: “Reality doesn’t go away,” Obama told Noah. “I’ve said to [Trump], look, if you can find different approaches to the problems, I don’t pretend I was the repository of all wisdom. What you can’t do is pretend they’re not problems.” That simple belief in common sense is something that seems to be lacking from some corners of the media (and the late-night comedy world) since November 8, but Obama continues to express it.
Perhaps Noah’s most pressing question about what happens next is what Obama will do as a private citizen, but it’s the thing that remains most elusive (he’s promised himself a vacation, but little else). There’s plenty to parse, though, from Obama’s even-handed attitude throughout the interview, especially when Noah asked him about his approach to speaking about issues of systemic racism without “alienating” people. Obama’s conviction in the power of clear, empathetic communication remains resolute, even after an electoral campaign that failed at times in that regard.
“My general theory is that if I was clear in my own mind about who I was, comfortable in my own skin, and had clarity about the way in which race continues to be this powerful factor in so many elements of our lives ... I always felt that if I really knew that and just communicated that as clearly as I could, I’d be okay,” he said. “How do I say this diplomatically? How do I say this in a way that it’s received?” It’s a question that’s obviously pressing for both Obama and Noah going forward, and it’s one the interview leaves dangling. There’ll be plenty of time to ask it in the days ahead.
Kanye West and Donald Trump’s Celebrity Kinship
Kanye West now holds the rare celebrity distinction of grabbing the attention of three consecutive presidents. George W. Bush said that West created the worst moment of his presidency when the rapper accused him of not caring about black people. Barack Obama called West a jackass because West had done some things that were pretty jackass-y.
And now Donald Trump has deemed West a good man and a friend, hugging him when Trump visited the Trump Tower this morning. West later said on Twitter that the two had discussed “multicultural issues,” such as “bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago” and that “it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.” He added, ominously, “#2024.” The media frenzy around his visit, for now, has taken attention away from other Trump doings.
For a lot of West fans, it’s another crisis in a year of them. The rapper once railed against American capitalists exploiting black people and ignoring their well-being. Now he’s palling around with a man who—to name just one of the many sources of cognitive dissonance today—may boost the private prison system West has denounced. The caveats: For a while now, enjoying West’s music has often required separating art from artist; with this being his first major public appearance since being hospitalized for psychiatric observation in November, West’s motives may be more tangled than ever; West has said he would have voted for Trump had he voted, but he donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign; and visiting the president-elect can be a chance to lobby him on topics you disagree about, as Al Gore presumably did when he met with Trump recently.
But even with all of that stipulated, there’s a feeling of inevitability around this morning’s photos of West and Trump in a golden lobby. Trump is, on some level, very much West’s kind of guy. The reason why that is goes beyond the superficial reading that Trump is an ostentatious rich man and West is a leader in the hip-hop world where ostentatious rich maleness is especially coveted (prior to trashing Jay Z during the campaign, Trump had a decades-long relationship with rap). Rather, Trump’s rhetoric and actions suggest a worldview in line with West’s, one in which talent is supposed to work like a magic talisman, removing all obstacles to exerting control.
The typical gist of the long speeches that West gives at concerts, or of the occasional interviews he gives, is that (1) Kanye is very good at whatever he does, and therefore (2) the world should let Kanye do whatever he wants. Hermes should have him as creative director. Mark Zuckerberg oughta collaborate with—and fund—him. Educators should let him design their curricula. And America should, whether in 2020 or 2024, elect him president. When he hears a spoken or implied “no”—as he has from, say, Nike—the speaker becomes a target of his ire. So naturally, the institution from which he hears the most naysaying, the media, is Kanye enemy No. 1.
Trump seems to approach the world in much the same way. His “I alone can fix it” pitch is near exactly the one that West goes around making. He is accused of authoritarian tendencies in part because he casually proposes policies that would fall outside of the Constitution’s constraints. And he rails against the media constantly. Trump’s allure, to hear West explain it, as he did on-stage last month, is not in the views he holds but rather in the way that he has unlocked power—his “nonpolitical methods to speaking” that are “very futuristic.” West believes Trump to have circumvented the traditional gatekeepers keeping a check on his ability to execute his vision—and really, who can argue?
In the same speech where he said he’d have voted for Trump—shortly after which he canceled the rest of his tour and checked into the hospital—he expressed hope that political celebrities of all parties could come together. “There’s things that Benjamin Carson believes in that I believe in,” he said. “I think that Benjamin Carson should still be a consultant. I think that Hillary Clinton should still be a consultant. I think that Bill Clinton should still be a consultant. Like Obama said, I think Obama should still be a consultant.” It wasn’t the first time he expressed a vision of a world governed by neither principles nor professionals, only famous people. Maybe that’s one of the things he and Trump talked about.
Making Art at the Painful Margins
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, and more.
Doug McLean
For three years, the writer Laurie Sheck suffered from an undiagnosed illness, an agonizing facial pain that put normal life out of reach. She sought medical attention, but the doctors couldn’t seem to determine what was wrong; some even suggested her symptoms were stress-induced, psychosomatic, a sign of madness. Meanwhile, the agony continued. “I would just sit at the dinner table with my husband and my daughter, thinking: If I could just have three minutes of normal life—if I could just sit here like a normal mother, I would be so happy,” she told me, in a phone interview.
Ultimately, she found a doctor who recognized her condition: trigeminal neuralgia, an excruciating disorder of a cranial nerve. Sheck now takes medication that manages the pain, which, according to the National Institutes for Health, can be extreme enough to be “physically and mentally incapacitating.” The experience seems to have influenced the composition of Sheck’s most recent books, which feature characters made into outcasts as a result of their disordered bodies. In 2009, she published a hybrid novel that reimagines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the monster’s perspective. Her new novel, Island of the Mad, also has the ailing, unattended body at its core: The hunchbacked narrator travels to Venice to search for something that may lessen a friend’s suffering—a lost notebook with clues about her own, mysterious malady.
In a contribution for this series, Sheck wrote about Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, a book disordered and nearly destroyed by illness. (His extreme form of epilepsy, in which racking seizures are prefaced by brief, visionary states of bliss, is sometimes called “Dostoyevsky Syndrome.”) Sheck looks at the novel’s shattering climax, which challenges us to take on a more radically empathetic form of compassion.
Sheck is the author of five books of poetry, including The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A faculty member at The New School’s MFA in Writing, she has had her work featured in venues like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
Laurie Sheck: Worldlessness, Hannah Arendt calls it—this state of radical isolation and loneliness that is so often a condition of the ill, the feared, the shunned, the stateless, the despised, the misunderstood, the powerless, the afflicted. What is taken away is a shared language, a sense of trust in being seen, the stability of genuine connection. As far back as childhood, long before I ever came across this word, I sought from books a way of drawing close to this realm of feeling. I wasn’t looking for consolation, much less explanation, but for the complex, textured presence of the uncomforted, the rawly vulnerable, the disrupted—hurt bodies and minds that in their radiance and affliction might lead me, as the jolt of illness sometimes does, toward a less protected, more open questioning.
To love these hurt minds and bodies is a way of touching, however lightly, the unknowable, hurt world— and of struggling, as much as possible, to feel its ungovernable reality.
This world of feeling is brought searingly to life in Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Idiot, a book that manages like no other to plunge fearlessly into suffering while at the same time illuminating the enduring, almost unspeakable beauty of the human. It opens with a young, epileptic man, Prince Myshkin, returning to St. Petersburg after years away for treatment in a sanitarium in Switzerland. The train windows are covered with fog—already there is an indication of the limits of human seeing.
This initial scene, with the frail, displaced stranger returning home to a city in many ways now unfamiliar, haunts and informs the entire book. Every aspect of the novel, even its structure, conveys a sense of precariousness and instability much like the epilepsy that alternately tightens and loosens its grip on Prince Myshkin but never lets go. It is his body’s truth, this thrashing and upheaval he experiences in his deepest being and can never fully decode. His illness instills in him an intuitive awareness of others’ suffering, and a certain apartness anchored in shame and a built-in mistrust of stability. But this sense of apartness derives also from an aspect of the epilepsy less dark but no less troubling or difficult—the lightning-flash of ecstasy, almost unbearable, that seizes him in the few seconds before the convulsion. This flood of sudden joy and ultimate well-being exists utterly apart from the civic, ordered world, its freedom like no other. Though indelible, it lasts only a few seconds before the brutal, excruciating swerve into seizure.
Instability leads to an odd radiance, an almost-wild breaking free.
The book itself can be seen as one long seizure or series of seizures: At the beginning its movement is calm, patient, but soon it complicates itself—accruing minute, precarious edges, hazardous turns. It surges forward with wrenching intensity, then suddenly halts as if distracted, almost frozen, blanking out. Or it trembles, teetering on the thinnest edge of structural integrity and coherence. Falls, darkens, gets up, falls again, darkens. Fills with sudden, almost unbearable light and beauty. Trembles again—its whole world contingent, in doubt, a body of oscillations, restiveness, vulnerability.
This instability leads to an odd radiance, an almost-wild breaking free from the strictures of received categories and dichotomous thinking. Everything is up for grabs, nothing taken for granted. As the book progresses, received notions of the real are thrashed, bruised, stunned, knocked down, changed. And so what is unsafe and crumbling also shines with lacerated promise.
Toward the end of the book there is a passage a few pages long so uncompromising and haunting in its transgressive beauty and honesty, that it, too, upends like an epileptic seizure. This passage, enacting a series of violent breakages as it carves fissure after fissure into anything taken for granted or familiar, becomes the opening through which the novel’s final, disconcerting light can enter—a light that makes possible no less than a radical re-envisioning of human tenderness.
The passage comes shortly after Prince Myshkin’s discovery that the young Rogozhin has murdered Nastasya Philippova, the beautiful, troubled woman who compels both men. Myshkin has arrived at Rogozhin’s room fearing the worst, and he has found it. A white marble-like foot protrudes from under the bed sheet. On the floor is a white dress, flowers, white ribbons. Rogozhin readily confesses to the murder.
Instead of fleeing, summoning the police, or lashing out at Rogozhin, Myshkin, trembling and in an almost dream-like state, does what Rogozhin requests and stays through the night with him. On and off for hours he comforts and strokes him. It is a scene of astonishing bravery and power, deeply weird and at the same time utterly believable. As the night goes on, Rogozhin grows increasingly delirious. And in those hours, Myshkin, as recounted by the book’s un-named narrator, “stretched out his trembling hand to him and softly touched his head, his hair, stroking them and stroking his cheeks…he could do nothing else!”
This is radical tenderness of the most disturbing, challenging, and uncharted nature.
It’s not that Myshkin doesn’t realize the horror of Rogozhin’s act, doesn’t feel it. “My legs won’t move…it’s from the terror, I know,” he observes. And later, “Quite a new sensation gnawed at his heart with infinite anguish.” This new, unnamed feeling is part of what keeps him beside Rogozhin. “At last he lay down on the pillow as though utterly helpless and despairing and put his face close to the pale, motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin’s cheeks.”
By morning, when the police arrive, Myshkin’s eyes appear unseeing. He doesn’t answer any of their questions. There’s no indication he will ever speak again. Shortly afterwards, he’s sent back to the sanitarium in Switzerland.
All that we can truly know is that Myshkin felt the reality of a suffering, delirious being and didn’t turn away from that being.
I love how, with one devastating passage, Dostoyevsky breaks open the accepted, meaning of “tenderness” and reveals its stark impurities and contradictions. It doesn’t hold itself apart from the perverse, the ugly, the tormented, the conflicted. A fissure opens, and Dostoyevsky finds within it the baffling, irreducible and to many, unacceptable, textures of the real. Like the relentless progression of a seizure, there is no pulling back.
By the time Dostoyevsky wrote his transcendent passage—so close to the book’s end—he had been through a period of enormous upheaval, less dramatic than his prison years though in its own way no less devastating or demanding. His notebooks for The Idiot show the many ways his book confused and eluded him from the beginning. For nearly a half year, having fled his creditors and living abroad in Geneva, he’d been filling notebooks with at least eight divergent, often wildly contradictory plans and character studies. His epileptic attacks had grown increasingly frequent and severe. “Two days ago I had a most violent attack, but yesterday nevertheless, I worked in a state verging on madness.” Partway through the writing, his first child, Sonya, was born and then, to his and his wife’s devastation, died that May, 1868, a mere three months later. Despairing, he somehow continued writing. In a late summer letter to his friend A.N. Maikov, he wrote “I am dissatisfied with my novel to the point of disgust. I have desperately tried to work but I haven’t been able to—My mind is sick. Now I shall put the finishing touches on Part 3. If I straighten out the novel, I will straighten out myself, if not—I am finished.”
The body is a site of tenderness, but also a problem that can’t be solved.
This edge he walked is everywhere palpable in the finished novel. Although he found his doubts hard to shake, in the end he came to feel the scene of Myshkin’s and Rogozhin’s final night together is the book’s justification and defining moment.
For me, part of the particular uncanniness of Dostoyevsky’s work lies in how even as he delves without hesitation or pity into the miserable, cruel, violent, extreme, his books enact a kind of tender holding of those who suffer and live on the margins, each cruel or violent act backlit by the human capacity for tenderness and wonder.
After the initial serial publication of The Idiot, Dostoyevsky could find no publishing house to issue the book in its entirety. It, too, was consigned to the margin. This is not surprising, given its deeply idiosyncratic form and the way it accommodates its own particular necessities, which can be too easily dismissible as sloppiness, confusion, insufficient focus, failed narrative. Yet part of what makes it so indelible and radiantly moving, and its scene between Myshkin and Rogozhin so masterfully and oddly beautiful, is the way in which the book itself becomes the very embodiment of the complexities and challenges of the margin. The Idiot sees and breathes from many margins, not least among them the margin of illness. It holds close the heartbreaking vulnerability of the unprotected body that seizes as Myshkin’s does, or wastes away like the despised peasant girl Marie, or sickens with tuberculosis like the frightened, embittered teenager Ippolit. The body is a site of tenderness, but also a problem that can’t be solved, a fraught place of ongoing crises, wars, injustices, failures. The desire for comfort and the reality of isolation pull and are unresolved.
Dostoyevsky knew this liminal realm all too well. Imprisoned at 28, first in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva, then in Siberia for four years followed by five years of enforced service in the military, also in Siberia, he lived far from the center of power, moving among the despised, the degraded, the punished. His epilepsy, too, repeatedly brought him into an abrupt state of intense, demanding removal, during which the world shattered, turned alien, his mind and body opening to an unspeakable otherness, then closing off again, darkening. Stability, steadiness, trust, self-control could no longer be relied on. He lived each day knowing that within a split second his brain could suddenly catch fire and he’d be thrashing on the floor, his eyes dilated, mouth foaming. While his wife was in labor with their first child, he experienced an attack that left him feeling deeply inadequate and ashamed. Often for weeks afterward he lived in a kind of mental darkness and devoid of his facility with words.
But the margin also gave Dostoyevsky his books. It’s from there that Myshkin cradles Rogozhin and comforts Marie, and thinks about the horrors of state-sanctioned execution, and the integrity and usefulness of donkeys. It’s from there that Myshkin intuits the hurt, violated being within Nastasya’s storminess and provocations.
In a letter to Maikov dated March 14, 1968, Dostoyevsky writes of his work-in-progress, “As regards The Idiot, I’m so afraid, so afraid—that you can’t even imagine.”
Each time I return to his book—my copy’s spine long broken, the pages bound together with rubber bands—I’m reminded of how all great books destabilize both reader and writer in one way or another. Dostoyevsky’s brave, unprotected tenderness of the margin, for one, demands of itself nothing less than a radical re-seeing of the world.
Trump's Choice of Tillerson Defies Senate Skeptics
For a moment, it looked like Donald Trump might have lost heart. On Saturday, well-sourced reporters were indicating that the president-elect’s appointment of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state was imminent. But then things went quiet. Trump tweeted noncommittal praise but made no announcement. Meanwhile, some leading Republicans began voicing concerns about the Exxon CEO’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Had the Saturday reports been a trial balloon that was shot down?
Apparently not. Early on Tuesday, Trump announced Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state. The pick sets up a battle between the Trump administration and Republicans in the Senate—likely the biggest showdown so far, with ramifications that include not just the conduct of American foreign policy but also the shape of Trump’s relationship with the GOP-led Congress for the foreseeable future.
Related Story
Like many of Trump’s picks, Tillerson has stunned observers, though not necessarily for the same reasons. He has no history of wild-eyed statements, like National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn, nor a declared agenda against his intended agency, like EPA Administrator-nominee Scott Pruitt, nor a self-declared inability to run a department and a total lack of experience in it, like Ben Carson, nominated to lead Housing and Urban Development. Tillerson is judged to be supremely competent, even by his harshest critics—too competent, they might say. But he also has no experience in diplomacy or government, a resume without precedent in the history of secretaries of state. (The closest analogue might be Bainbridge Colby, a close friend of Woodrow Wilson’s handed the job in 1920; his appointment “ran the gamut from puzzlement to outrage,” a Wilson biographer wrote, and Colby’s single year in office was undistinguished.)
Like many of Trump’s most interesting stances and allies, the Tillerson nomination cuts across typical coalitions and ideological lines. Many Democrats will instinctively oppose him, in part because he’s a Trump pick and the head of Exxon, a liberal bogeyman. But others may back him, calculating that a successful business executive is not a soft political target. But the Senate has a rhythm of its own and can move unpredictably. Depending on how tightly Democrats whip their votes, a few Republicans defecting could sink a Tillerson nomination. And that’s where things get interesting.
Tillerson has a long history of business with Russia, and in particular with the Putin regime. A lifelong Exxon employee, he managed the oil giant’s Russia business before ascending to the corner office, in part on the strength of his ties in Russia. The company inked a major deal with Rosneft, the Russian state petroleum company, and it has been critical of sanctions levied on Moscow by the Obama administration, as they cost Exxon dearly. In 2013, Putin awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship, a special if eccentric national prize.
Although Trump won the election while promising improved relations with Russia—even calling on the country to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and saying he might recognize the annexation of Crimea—many Republicans remain more hawkish on Russia, and they have expressed hesitations of varying degrees about Tillerson. To a certain extent, their concerns are amplified by the ongoing story of Russian hacking into the presidential election, which the CIA says was intended to help elect Trump. On Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted, referring to the Order of Friendship:
Being a "friend of Vladimir" is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState - MR
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 11, 2016
On Tuesday, Rubio followed up with a statement:
While Rex Tillerson is a respected businessman, I have serious concerns about his nomination. The next secretary of state must be someone who views the world with moral clarity, is free of potential conflicts of interest, has a clear sense of America's interests, and will be a forceful advocate for America's foreign policy goals to the president, within the administration, and on the world stage. I look forward to learning more about his record and his views.
Senator John McCain, who has been outspoken in his concerns about Russian electoral interference, also expressed reservations on Sunday. “I don’t know what Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with Vladimir Putin was, but I’ll tell you it is a matter of concern to me,” he said on Fox News. “You want to give the president of the United States the benefit of the doubt because the people have spoken. But Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully and a murderer, and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.”
McCain’s friend Lindsey Graham took a similar line. “Based upon his extensive business dealings with the Putin government and his previous opposition of efforts to impose sanctions on the Russian government, there are many questions which must be answered,” the South Carolinian said in a statement. “I expect the U.S.-Russian relationship to be front and center in his confirmation process.”
A spokesman for Ben Sasse, the Nebraskan who has been a staunch critic of Trump, tweeted that “Mr. Tillerson is a man of tremendous accomplishment, but U.S. policy toward Russia’s Soviet-style aggression demands rigorous oversight.” Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, in his trademark inscrutable Twitter pidgin, seemed to voice similar concerns, asking that Trump and Tillerson read a Wall Street Journal column critical of Putin.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller told CNN, without providing examples, that Tillerson had stood up to Putin.
Sitting somewhat to the side of the debate, as often, is Senator Rand Paul. It’s been reported, though not confirmed, that Trump will buttress Tillerson’s lack of experience by appointing John Bolton, the superhawk and former ambassador to the United Nations, as deputy secretary of state. The Kentuckian says he’s an “automatic no” on Bolton.
On the other hand, plenty of Republicans are already on board. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he’ll support Tillerson’s nomination. And even Jeff Flake, an Arizona senator who was a noisy critic of Trump, seemed positive:
The fact that Condi Rice, James Baker and Bob Gates are recommending Tillerson carries considerable weight. I look forward to the hearings.
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) December 13, 2016
That support from respected former Republican Cabinet secretaries is indeed interesting and notable. All three were critical of Trump during the campaign, and all three hail from rather different foreign-policy lineages than Trump. It is impossible to tell how they might overlap or diverge from Tillerson, who has articulated only a limited sort of diplomatic worldview.
But just as a Secretary Tillerson might have an incentive to be friendly to Russia, Rice, Baker, and Gates might have some incentive to boost Tillerson. As Isaac Arnsdorf lays out, Baker’s law firm represents Exxon and Rosneft, as well as Gazprom, the Russian state natural-gas concern. Rice and Gates, meanwhile, run a consulting firm that does business with Exxon.
Hill-watchers see the Tillerson nomination as Trump’s most audacious pick, because of the risks. Not since 1989, when Democrats blocked John Tower’s nomination as secretary of defense, has a Cabinet nominee been rejected, and the president at the time came from a different party. But several nominees have been withdrawn when their confirmation chances ran into difficulty, most of them in the last 25 years.
The critics of the Tillerson nomination all left the door open to backing Tillerson, essentially pleading with him to make so unequivocal a condemnation of Putin that he they can confidently support him. But what if they don’t? Or what if he won’t? What would have led Trump to take that chance, despite the warning shots over the weekend?
Perhaps Trump is willing to risk dying on this hill because his affinity for Russia is truly strong. There’s ample evidence to suggest that: His praise for Putin, his disdain for NATO, his steadfast refusal to even countenance the idea that Russia might have been behind hacks in the election. Selecting Tillerson reinforces his desire to reach an understanding with the Kremlin. Or perhaps Trump sees in Tillerson some sort of foreign-policy brilliance not yet revealed to the public.
But who knows? While there’s probably no single answer, a central factor may be that Trump just doesn’t think the Senate is a threat. Consider the track record. Republican leaders in the House and Senate criticized Trump for his policy ideas, called his statements racist, and otherwise distanced themselves from him for months. In the end, they split into two main camps. There were those, like Sasse and Flake, who never wavered, and while their stand was courageous, Trump can look back now and see it didn’t come near stopping him. Then there were those, like McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan, who choked back their reservations and endorsed Trump. The president-elect has learned his lesson: There’s nothing Republicans in Congress can or will to slow him down, whether it’s his extensive conflicts of interest or his Cabinet nominations. Until they prove him wrong, why would he believe otherwise?
Rex Tillerson's World: In His Own Words
Rex Tillerson, whom President-elect Donald Trump nominated Tuesday to be the secretary of state, has a long history of dealmaking as the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company. It’s a skill that would be useful in his new role, but it’s also an attribute that might cause problems for him during his confirmation process in the U.S. Senate. Already, doubts are being raised about his long relationship with Russia, as well as his lack of political experience. But running a global corporation that would be world’s 41st-largest economy were it a country is no small feat; nor are Tillerson’s views about some of the world’s most pressing problems what his critics might expect.
I read five years worth of speeches made by Tillerson on Exxon’s website, and comments elsewhere, and they reveal a pragmatic executive confident about the role of energy in the world, the benefits of deregulation as well as free trade, and the dangers posed by climate change and the best ways to tackle it. Many of these views appear to diverge from Trump’s positions. Here’s a short list:
Russia
Tillerson’s relations with Russia are likely to come under the most scrutiny. President Vladimir Putin once presented him with the Order of Friendship, an award given to foreigners who work to improve relations with Russia. Trump’s expressed desire to work more closely with Russia, combined with his dismissal of the CIA’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the U.S. presidential election, has already prompted concern about Tillerman’s nomination. In October 2015, Tillerman called Exxon’s Sakhlin-1 project in the Russian Arctic one he “take[s] a lot of personal pride” in. The project has been stalled because of U.S. and Western sanctions imposed on Russia following the country’s invasion of Crimea—sanctions that Trump could move to lift and which Tillerson has called ineffective. Speaking in June 2014, Tillerman touted the potential of the Arctic, noting: “In the years ahead, we look forward to taking advances achieved in these cutting-edge successes in Far East Russia and building upon them to unlock new supplies of oil and natural gas in the Kara Sea and beyond.”
Iran
The deal Western nations, China, and Russia struck with Iran on its nuclear program opened the door for Western energy companies to gain access to the Islamic Republic’s vast energy resources. Tillerson, as CEO of Exxon, was cautious about the prospects of any such a deal, telling CNBC in March:
U.S. companies like ours are still unable to conduct business in Iran. A lot of our European competitors are in, working actively. I don't know that we're necessarily at a disadvantage. The history of Iranian—in foreign investment in the past, their terms were always quite challenging, quite difficult. We--never had large investments in Iran for that reason. And I don’t know that the Iranians are gonna be any different today. We’ll have to wait and see and there hasn’t been any contracts put out. But I also learned a long time ago that sometimes being the first in is not necessarily best. We'll wait and see if things open up for U.S. companies. We would certainly take a look because it's a huge resource-owning country.
Trump has called the deal with Iran “disastrous” and has pledged to tear it up once he’s in office. If that were to occur, it would be Tillerson’s job to explain to U.S. allies, as well as his friends in Moscow, the rationale for the decision.
Energy independence and trade
The idea of energy independence has had bipartisan support in Washington since President Nixon announced his plan to wean the U.S. off of foreign sources of energy. And though the U.S., through the energy boom of the past few years, has come closer to achieving this goal, Tillerson has said he believes global interdependence—not energy independence—is the way to stability. In 2007, he told the Council on Foreign Relations:
Should the United States seek so-called energy independence in an elusive effort to insulate this country from the impact of world events on the economy, or should Americans pursue the path of international engagement, seeking ways to better compete within the global market for energy? Like the Council's founders, I believe we must choose the course of greater international engagement. ... The central reality is this: The global free market for energy provides the most effective means of achieving U.S. energy security by promoting resource development, enabling diversification, multiplying our supply channels, encouraging efficiency, and spurring innovation.
Those views carry over to free trade. In 2013, Tillerson said of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal:
Even when a nation does not have a rich endowment of resources, we have learned that open markets and free trade can bring nations the energy supplies they need. But only governments can open the avenues of free trade. In the years ahead, as the economy and energy landscape evolves worldwide, leaders in the United States and Asia will need to examine how their own policies can support international cooperation and energy trade.
One of the most promising developments on this front is the ongoing effort for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The eleven nations that have been working to lower trade barriers and end protectionist policies under this Partnership are a diverse mix of developed and developing economies. But all of them understand the value of open markets to growth and progress for every nation.
That position puts him at odds with Trump, who wants the U.S. to leave the TPP because, in his view, it hurts American workers. Trump has also said he wants to renegotiate U.S. trade deals with partner countries in order to protect U.S. workers. One of the president-elect’s first moves was, Trump said, to persuade Carrier, the air-conditioning company, not to ship some of its jobs to Mexico. But in October 2014, Tillerman questioned such moves: “By restricting trade or picking winners and losers, government hinders investment and innovation,” he said.
Climate change
The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts are investigating whether Exxon hid from investors what it knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change. But in recent years Tillerson and Exxon have been advocates of market-driven solutions to mitigate the risk of climate change. Exxon, under Tillerson, supported the Paris climate accord, from which Trump has said he wants to withdraw. Earlier this year, Tillerson said: “We share the view that the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action.” Tillerson has made the case for a carbon tax “as the best policy of those being considered.”
That view—and others—are likely to be raised at Tillerson’s confirmation hearing, as senators seek more information on how his worldview matches Trump’s and where they possibly differ.
Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog
- Atlantic Monthly Contributors's profile
- 1 follower
