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Your 2017 Oscars Crash Course

As Hollywood’s biggest night looms and the Academy Award predictions pour in, you may find yourself feeling out of the Oscars loop. Maybe you don’t like awards shows but are being dragged to a viewing party. Perhaps you aren’t sure about this year’s controversies, or maybe you haven’t seen any of the Best Picture nominees. With all the sequels, remakes, and bad superhero movies that crowded screens in 2016, it’s easy to have missed some of the films in contention for cinema’s most coveted prize.

In light of that, we’ve prepared a crash course of the best Oscars-related pieces from Atlantic writers over the last few months, that should help you out for when the big night rolls around on February 26. (We will be updating this post throughout the week with links to our official predictions and stories about Fences, Fire at Sea, and more.)

A still from Moonlight (A24)

The Big Players

Leading the race with a record 14 nominations this year is Damien Chazelle’s nostalgic, musical love-letter to Hollywood, La La Land, which won attention early on in awards season. Perhaps its closest competitor is the word-of-mouth hit Moonlight, a gorgeous and intimate low-budget film from Barry Jenkins that tells the story of a boy growing up black and gay in Miami. Aside from La La Land and Moonlight, which both swept the 2017 Golden Globes, the other movies in the running for Best Picture include Denis Villeneuve’s epic sci-fi film Arrival, which may not only be one of the best “first-contact” films ever made but also asks timely questions about empathy in a geopolitical context. Kenneth Lonergan’s heartbreaking drama Manchester by the Sea, which makes Amazon the first streaming service to enter the Oscars playground, is also a competitor.

Rounding out the list are the neo-Western Hell or High Water, which makes some relevant points about economic mistrust in America today; the groundbreaking Hidden Figures, centering on three pioneering African American women mathematicians whose calculations were integral to NASA in the 1960s; Mel Gibson’s war drama Hacksaw Ridge, which sees the disgraced star return to the spotlight; Garth Davis’s inspirational, true-life drama Lion; and Denzel Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences.

Loving’s Ruth Negga at the Academy Award Nominees Luncheon (Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP)

The Individual Honors

The race for Best Actor is led by Casey Affleck for Manchester by the Sea, albeit in rather controversial circumstances; Andrew Garfield, Viggo Mortensen, Denzel Washington, and Ryan Gosling are also vying for the prize. The Best Actress category sees the return of Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s vivid, manicured new film. Ruth Negga’s emotional performance in Jeff Nichols’s Loving, about the couple behind the Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage, earns her a nod. Somewhat surprisingly, Annette Bening misses out for a strong performance in 20th Century Women, which earned the writer-director Mike Mills a single nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

For the third time, Viola Davis is in the running for Best Supporting Actress, this year for Fences, while 2012 winner Octavia Spencer is also nominated for Hidden Figures. Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali is a favorite for Best Supporting Actor, and Michael Shannon got a nod for Nocturnal Animals over his co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who surprisingly won a Golden Globe.

I Am Not Your Negro. (Magnolia Pictures / Amazon Studios)

The Docs

The nominees for Best Documentary Feature made powerful arguments about real-life issues, particularly about race in America. Raoul Peck’s imperfect, but powerful film I Am Not Your Negro adapts an unfinished work by one of America’s great essayists, James Baldwin. The ever-versatile Ava DuVernay gets a nod for her Netflix-released 13th, which rewrites America’s history of mass incarceration as a new form of slavery. In a year that saw an FX adaptation of the O.J. Simpson trial, there’s also O.J.: Made in America, a vital, five-part documentary that blurs the lines between a TV show and a movie.

A still from Moana (Disney)

The Animated Wonders

If you’re tuning in for more otherworldly or fantastical reasons, then you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the Best Animated Feature category. Disney, for the first time since 2002, has two films in the running for this one, with the beautiful, Polynesian-set Moana (also nominated in the Best Original Song category for Hamilton star Lin Manuel-Miranda’s “How Far I’ll Go”) going up against the delightful Zootopia. The Oscar-winning animator and director Michaël Dudok de Wit’s sparse, elegant Studio Ghibli-produced The Red Turtle gets a nod, too, along with Laika’s visually stunning stop-motion, Kubo and the Two Strings.

The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (center) and the co-stars of his film The Salesman, Taraneh Alidoosti (left) and Shahab Hosseini at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in in May 2016. (Yves Herman / Reuters)

The Politics

Of course it’s hard to keep politics entirely out of this year’s ceremonies, particularly in the wake of a divisive election of a largely unpopular president. It’ll be interesting to watch the Best Foreign-Language Film category, where despite the nomination of Maren Ade’s remarkably unique comedy Toni Erdmann, all eyes will be on the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Arthur Miller-inspired drama The Salesman. Farhadi, who previously picked up the award in 2011 for A Separation, announced that he won’t be attending this year’s ceremony because of Trump’s recent executive order on immigration, which was later hobbled by a series of federal court decisions.

Somewhat conspicuously absent from the ceremony will be Nate Parker’s historical film The Birth of a Nation, which earned early praise from critics at last year’s Sundance, but was mired by resurfacing rape allegations against Parker. The misguided parallels between Casey Affleck and Nate Parker undoubtedly clouds the former’s Best Actor nod, while the contentious figure of Mel Gibson also returns to mainstream Hollywood’s fold after years away from the spotlight for repeated bigoted remarks.

And while the #OscarsSoWhite criticism appears more subdued this year than in the past thanks to a more diverse slate of nominees, the awards’ overwhelmingly male focus remains a problem: No women were nominated for directing, and just one (Allison Schroeder for Hidden Figures) made it to the Screenplay categories.

Questions about the Oscars’ political relevance will continue to loom: Will the night go down the same outspoken route as the SAG Awards? Or will Hollywood’s introverted politics reign again, as they did at the Golden Globes? While watching, you may find yourself questioning if there should even be an Oscars in the first place.

For now, prepare your ballots.

Trump Returns to the Campaign Trail

After his first four weeks in office, Donald Trump left the the White House for Florida, where he soaked up the cheers of thousands of adoring fans. It has not been an easy month for Trump, with a federal judge blocking his travel ban, the resignation of his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and the constant intelligence leaks. But Saturday was a chance to move beyond that, to lay out his agenda and air his grievances in the campaign-rally style he seems to enjoy most.

Trump spent his third weekend in Florida, at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which he has now taken to calling the “Southern White House.” He was working again, interviewing candidates for the role of national security advisor, which Flynn left earlier this week after it was reported that he’d misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversation with the Russian ambassador. That was just the latest episode in a tumultuous start for Trump. Amid reports of constant squabbles in his inner circle, Trump seems to be increasingly frustrated with the bureaucracy and the judiciary, which he has complained seem bent on opposing his agenda. The campaign trail, on the other hand, is where Trump has always seemed happiest, ad-libbing in front of a crowd that cheers his every word.

“I want to be among my friends,” Trump told the crowd Saturday evening, “and among the people.”

The rally began a little after 5 p.m. with a succession of surrogates firing up the crowd, repeating Trump’s campaign slogans to make the country safer, to put America first, and to keep the country safe by keeping certain people out. Nearly an hour later Air Force One pulled up in front of the hangar like a limo at a red-carpet event. A jet bridge motored toward the plane’s door, and down stepped Trump and the first lady.

Ivanka opened the rally by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Shortly after Trump took over, stepped in front of the mic and told the crowd why he’d come: “I want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news—the dishonest media which has published one false story after another.”

That was a major theme of the rally. The road bumps he’s hit, he seemed to be saying, were either unscrupulous lies invented by the media, or are part of its agenda to attack him. The media has its own agenda, he said, “and it’s not your agenda.”

He had a prepared text, and at times he stuck to the script, which listed all the policies he’d tried to implement in his first 30 days in office. He talked most about the travel ban, which a federal judge in Seattle has blocked. As he has before, Trump said that it was wrong for a judge to be able to limit his power to block certain people—people Trump has called potentially dangerous—from entering the country. But in style he often deviated from his prepared remarks, often to castigate the press, which he called “part of the corrupt system.”  He even read from a note Thomas Jefferson sent to a newspaper editor and senator from Michigan, John Norvell. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Trump quoted Jefferson saying. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

(Before he ascended to the presidency, Jefferson wrote: “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”)

Trump, as he has ever since inauguration day, also complained that the media seems bent on minimizing the size of his fan base. So he made sure to point out what “a massive hangar” hosted the rally, and that a huge crowd was jam-packed inside it. But, he complained to the bank of cameras broadcasting the event around the world, the media would never show how many people turned up to his rally. “Do you think one media network back there will show this crowd?” he asked to raucous cheers. “Not one!”

Then Trump recognized a man in the crowd. It was someone he’d seen earlier, he said, one of his supporters interviewed on TV. The man, who CNN identified as Gene Huber, said earlier that he’d arrived at the hangar at 4 a.m. to make sure he was the first in line. Trump told him to come on stage, directing him to hop the fence and waving him past Secret Service. “He’s been all over television, saying the best things,” Trump told the crowd, which burst out in applause.  

On stage, the man spoke briefly and fawningly about Trump and the great movement he had created. Trump smiled.  

Trump did take some time to talk about the policies he hoped implement. He said he would revoke Obamacare and replace it with something better, that costs less—although he did not go into any details. He said he planned to repeal regulations placed on oil, gas, and coal companies. “The miners are going back to work!” Trump said. He also promised to bring back jobs, then talked about how he’d already forced GM, Ford, and Chrysler to pull out of deals that would’ve shipped jobs out of the country—although the details of those deals are more complicated. He also mentioned a new Intel plant set to open in Arizona that would create 10,000 jobs. That factory has been under construction for several years, but Intel’s CEO announced it would invest $7 billion into the plant that would create even more positions right after a meeting with Trump earlier this month. These portions of the speech largely repeated points Trump has repeatedly emphasized, including in his most recent press conference.

But he also took the opportunity to unburden himself of the many grievances he’s built up in his first 30 days as president. The energy of the crowd seemed to recharge Trump. He returned to his campaign-trail form, standing behind the podium and in front of thousands of people who loved him, and not in Washington D.C. before a room packed with the lying, dishonest press.

Trump closed out the rally the way he always did last summer, with his vow to make America great again. Then he walked back to Air Force One, with the Rolling Stones’ “You can’t always get what you want” playing in the background.

Fences and Fake News: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Why Fences Should Win the Best Picture Oscar

Nosheen Iqbal | The Guardian

“It’s theatrical cinema—the film is confined to a handful of backdrops inside the Maxson home and backyard; all the flourishes and drama unfurl from Wilson’s dense, poetic dialogue, a gift to both Washington (here as actor, director and producer) and Viola Davis, who plays Troy’s wife Rose. Washington could be on course to become one of only seven actors ever to win three acting Oscars for his showboaty turn here, but it’s Davis who is the film’s solid, steely anchor. Her performance is subtle and heartbreaking, and keeps the film from tipping into easy sentimentality.”

How Yayoi Kusama Channels Mental Illness Into art

Anna Fifeld | The Washington Post

“In 1957 she managed to get a passport and a visa, and sewed dollars into her dresses to circumvent postwar currency ­controls … Making matters worse, she found herself in abject poverty. Her bed was an old door, and she scavenged fish heads and old vegetables from dumpsters and boiled them into soup. But this situation made Kusama throw herself into her work even more. She began producing her first trademark Infinity Net paintings, huge canvases—one was 33 feet high—covered with mesmerizing waves of small loops that seemed to go on and on. ‘White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness,’ is how she described them.”

The True History of Fake News

Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books

“In the long history of misinformation, the current outbreak of fake news has already secured a special place, with the president’s personal adviser, Kellyanne Conway, going so far as to invent a Kentucky massacre in order to defend a ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. But the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.”



Is Travel Writing Dead?

Karan Mahajan | Granta

“The estrangement that travel engenders is far more profound than the images consumed on a trip. I would prefer to see American writers who have spent significant time abroad magnifying and expounding on problems at home. Too often, a kind of travel writing—especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale —feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home. Travel literature should go local and micro, but with international heft.”

How Sportswriting Became a Liberal Profession

Bryan Curtis | The Ringer

“Of course, labels like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ don’t translate perfectly to sports. Do you have to be liberal to call Roger Goodell a tool? So maybe it’s better to put it like this: There was a time when filling your column with liberal ideas on race, class, gender, and labor policy got you dubbed a ‘sociologist.’ These days, such views are more likely to get you a job.”

Is Apathy the Key to J.M. Coetzee’s Novels?

Christian Lorentzen | Vulture

“It’s an astonishing idea—apathy as a source of, not an obstacle to, seriousness. We know writers who write in quest of ecstasy, out of mimetic fidelity to ordinary life, out of a quasi-therapeutic impulse, out of personal or political rage (D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth), out of narcissism, or even out of hostility to the task (Thomas Bernhard). But apathy? Surely it’s an anti-novelistic quality, but it rings true to Coetzee’s work and the cold, cerebral, disinterested character of many of his heroes: an apathy of self-protection.”



Vogue’s Race Problem Is Bigger Than Karlie Kloss

Jennifer Hope Choi | BuzzFeed

“While the geisha is traditionally considered a female entertainer in Japan (performing music, dance, and hostess duties for guests), her coquettish and submissive manners have congealed into a haunting stereotype Asian American women have, for decades, attempted to divorce. Vogue’s diversity problem isn’t Karlie Kloss but rather the geisha image itself, and the persistent desire to exoticize otherness in its storied pages.”

Against Fame: On Publishing, Popularity, and Ambition

Manjula Martin | Catapult

“If you go by dictionaries, being famous just means being very popular. If you go by cultural experience, it’s much more. Unless you’ve been living in some blessedly boring and naive parallel universe, fame is basically the greatest thing a person can aspire to, especially in America, especially if you’re a creative person. When I interviewed famous authors for Scratch, I always asked about their experiences of fame, mostly because it’s a question that tends to lead to good quotes. What every writer I’ve interviewed has told me is that fame is just a side effect of success. It’s not success itself. To reach for it is to invite misery, distraction, and inauthenticity.”

Rescuing Norman Rockwell’s Progressive Legacy From a Right-Wing Cartoonist

Angus Johnson | Hyperallergic

“Rockwell understood that the idyllic America he depicted was fragile, and that its embrace didn’t extend to everyone. Later in his career he made that point with growing explicitness, as in the 1961 Golden Rule, which depicts people of a wide variety of ages, religions, and nationalities—everyone in the Four Freedoms series is a white American—standing shoulder to shoulder behind the phrase ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

Can AI Make Musicians More Creative?

Hazel Cills | MTV News

“Life in 2017 does feel a little like The Jetsons, as people install digital assistants named Alexa in their homes, buy ‘smart fridges’ that tell you what you’re missing in your kitchen, and welcome self-driving cars into existence. And while it's easy to see how computers can help you buy a T-shirt through voice command or calculate how many calories you consume in a meal, when it comes to AI and art, the lines are blurrier. Many remain skeptical of a machine’s ability to create something that rivals or replaces human creativity.”

Crashing Is an Antidote to Cynical Comedy Shows

“This is great,” says the comedian Pete Holmes, early in one episode of his new HBO series Crashing, which premieres Sunday. He’s talking to a group of fellow stand-up strivers who are about to spend the afternoon handing out comedy-club fliers to earn stage time for their own performances; unlike him, they look miserable. “West Village, look at us!” Pete continues. “Standing on the corner, eating street food. We’re gonna do a set tonight at a club in Manhattan. I love this.” One of the crew tilts his head at Pete. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

The exchange more or less sums up Pete’s relationship with the world of comedy, and the world at large, within Crashing. The show, which was executive produced by Judd Apatow, revs up its plot with a development that would level a less starry-eyed protagonist: Pete walks in on his wife cheating on him. After a requisite period of self-pity, though, what unfolds is an account of irrepressible cheeriness.

Pete, a floppy-haired gentle giant and a fictionalized younger version of Holmes himself, seems incapable of sustained anger or malice. He apologizes to a man towing his car and is so unthreatening that his wife’s lover, “Leaf,” treats him in the head-patting manner of a guidance counselor. But as he moves from couch to couch—his wife supported him financially while he “worked” for free at comedy clubs, so his imminent divorce comes with a side of homelessness—he starts to forge connections and professional footholds, largely by way of the same too-kind disposition that gets him mocked in initial encounters. Via Pete’s headlong, wide-grinned adventures, Crashing turns a familiar conceit into a delightful extended riff on the power of positive thinking that’s hilarious and hopeful in equal measure.

Crashing has many of the hallmarks of one of 21st-century TV’s defining genres: the comedy about comedians, the peek behind the laugh-factory curtain. Guest stars abound, most immediately with Artie Lange playing a kind of hoarse, vulgar guardian angel. Shop-talk flows constantly, as characters rehash sets and rework bits, and roasting is lingua franca. “You look like you work for a homeless person,” T.J. Miller, a real-life Holmes associate best known for his work on Silicon Valley, tells Lange backstage before a show. “Are you interning on Skid Row? What cargo are you carrying in cargo pants? Nostalgia for the ’90s?”

Crashing feels distinct from recent comedian-centric shows like Louie and Maron and movies like Don’t Think Twice that have traded in a certain darkness—the agonized performer, humor as an outlet for the world-weary. Despite his troubles, the character of Pete isn’t a tortured genius; he’s a gleeful dweeb. (“I like Albany,” he says to one crowd by way of an opener. “It’s all of the bany. It’s not some of the bany, I like that.”) His ambition is coated heavily in fandom, and he practically melts whenever he meets an industry A-lister. You sense, even as Pete’s private life is a wreck and his professional one makes what might objectively be called meager gains, that he has to fight off an urge to pinch himself at his good fortune. He’s telling jokes and rubbing elbows with his heroes—how cool is that!? Every aspect of the show seems informed by its main character’s—and creator’s—joy.  Plots unfold with rollicking energy, actors ham it up, and the script seems sometimes to read only, “Chuckles abound,” as when Pete and some pals spend a montage mock-surprising one another with excellent news.

Comedy also has room for figures like Holmes, for whom the craft is less a burden than a blast.

It’s a sensibility that fans of Holmes’s other work will recognize. You Made It Weird, his podcast on the Nerdist network, features Holmes talking with guests in multi-hour geek-out sessions, complete with improvised bits and microphone-distorting laughter. The Pete Holmes Show, a Conan follow-up that lasted for 80 episodes from 2013 to 2014 on TBS, similarly mined its host’s obsessions and sunny tendencies. He performed monologues that were more like miniature stand-up sets than the usual “You heard about this?” news fare, donned costumes for superhero spoofs, and once wrapped the famous mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey in a bear-hug, saying, “That’s my signature move.”

Pete’s eager-to-please style isn’t for everyone, and Crashing’s detractors will supply their own adjectives. “Charming” will turn to “cloying,” “sweet” to “sappy.” A generation has learned that television comedy can involve real psychic stakes, and some viewers used to seeing Louis C.K. deal with the true-to-life travails of parenthood might not enjoy the less weighty sight of, say, Pete intruding clumsily on his wife’s yard sale. Preferences between the two modes will say more about predilection than merit, but in certain moments one does almost glimpse Holmes standing just outside the shot, laughing a little too hard at himself.

At its best, though, Crashing is a kind of corrective, and an honest one at that. Comedy need not be only the refuge of the cynic. It also has room for figures like Holmes, for whom the craft is less a burden than a blast. “I want to make people happy,” Pete says, but his words feel almost redundant. If prestige TV has lately been home to some of stand-up’s prickliest denizens, Holmes bounds in with a smile, steadfast in a belief that laughter does more than serve as a bitter tonic. It renders life whole, it eases troubles, it makes good things happen and bad things go away.  This is great, indeed.

100,000 National Guardsmen Mobilized to Deport Immigrants? The Anatomy of a News Cycle

Friday morning, the Associated Press dropped a bombshell report: “Trump administration considers mobilizing as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants,” the new agency’s Twitter account announced.

The hubbub that followed, as the White House denied the report, is a case study in the strange dance between the press and the Trump administration, and the complicated environment of information asymmetry, and misinformation, that characterizes the current moment in American politics. And it shows how the Trump administration deflects genuine reporting by caricaturing it, sometimes clumsily, as “fake news.”

The AP tweet came at 10:12 a.m. Eastern time, with the full story coming a few minutes later:

The Trump administration is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana.

The story is a classic Trump administration story: a sweeping, surprising move; a leaked memo substantiating the story, emerging from a very leaky administration; and a policy in keeping with the president’s campaign promise to deport illegal immigrants.

The story quickly mushroomed online and in social media, with stunned reaction at the idea of the U.S. government deploying a hundred thousand armed troops around the country, away from the border. Reporters scrambled to figure out what the legal authority for the move would be, and to figure out how state governments might react.

And yet some people immediately sensed that something about the story seemed off:

How long before this turns out to be highly exaggerated/not true at all? https://t.co/inuI9vIhYL

— neontaster (@neontaster) February 17, 2017

Within minutes, in fact, Trump officials denied the story, on the record, to reporters. Press Secretary Sean Spicer spoke to a White House reporters as President Trump prepared to leave for a trip to South Carolina, saying, “That is 100% not true. It is false. It is irresponsible to be saying this. There is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants.”

But Spicer’s comment added two interesting wrinkles. First, he scolded the AP for not seeking comment before publishing the story. But as a reporter responded, the AP had asked both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment multiple times before publication, and had received nothing.

Spicer also said, “It is not a White House document.” That statement was intriguing, because Spicer wasn’t denying that the memo was real; he was only saying it came from outside the White House. But that didn’t conflict with the AP report, which said the memo was written by Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly.  “I don’t know what could potentially be out there, but I know that there is no effort to do what is potentially suggested,” Spicer added.

Meanwhile, other reporters were trying to get DHS to explain what was going on.

DHS confirms that the memo reported by AP did exist; but they said it was "never seriously considered" https://t.co/4kB6rLfyCX

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) February 17, 2017

In other words, the memo was in fact real. The full text was available online within about 90 minutes of the original AP tweet. It is hardly a skimpy document—it’s full of bullet points, legal citations, and footnotes. And it also offered some clarity. The clause the AP report referenced involved inviting states to enroll guardsmen in the existing federal 287(g) program that authorizes state law-enforcement officials “to perform the functions of an immigration officer” with respect to “the investigation, apprehension, and detention of aliens.” Notably, that would require the governors of individual states to decide whether or how to participate, and it is framed as an expansion of current efforts rather than a dramatic shift in policy.

Still unresolved is the question of how serious a proposal the memorandum may be, or whether it remains under active consideration. There are a range of possibilities: It had been considered but rejected as outlandish. It’s part of a plan that’s still in drafting. Maybe someone asked Kelly what it would take to expel a huge number of immigrants, and this was his back-of-the-envelope calculation. This is a question that DHS could have resolved by commenting to the AP before publication.

Spicer and the Trump administration were quick to dismiss the report as shoddy work, just more example of the “fake news” that the president so enjoys deriding. But underneath his denials, there is the uncomfortable fact that DHS confirmed the memo as real. The press comes out of this looking bad, too, offering more fodder to critics who are convinced that reporters will go to any length to tear down the Trump administration. Yet, again, the memo was real, and the AP sought comment.

As with so many other incidents, it’s a Rorschach test for views on the administration. If you’re inclined to view the Trump team as bumbling and incompetent, then this shows their foolishness in not simply resolving the AP’s questions ahead of time, and suggests that Spicer is out of the loop on what’s going on inside the government. If you’re inclined to view the Trump team as evil geniuses, then it’s a brilliant gambit, suckering the AP into looking bad by reporting the memo, and only denying it after the fact, thus undermining trust in the media.

The DHS memo is not the first time we’ve seen this pattern. In January, The New York Times obtained a draft memo about reinstituting CIA “black sites” and potentially bringing back torture programs. Then, too, Spicer said it was “not a White House document” and said he had “no idea where it came from.” Little has been heard about the black-site plan since then.

The challenge for the press, operating in a low-information environment where the White House comments slowly or never, is challenging. If the administration were really considering deploying 100,000 National Guard troops, it would be a major story, of importance to all readers. Washington veterans are inclined to see this memo, like the black-site one, as a trial balloon, in which the administration allows a proposal to leak, gauges reaction, and then either disclaims it or moves forward depending on what sort of reception the idea receives. But just because something is possibly a trial balloon doesn’t mean that it’s not newsworthy and important.

Yet there’s a risk, too, of outrage exhaustion. Having big blowups over draft memos, which Spicer can then deny, goes some way to inoculating the administration against further damage, because the story has already been in the public domain. The final result may not be quite as outlandish as it initially appeared, but it might be important—yet by then, exhaustion has set in. Here’s a pithy summary of the cycle:

Leak Outrageous Thing



Outrage



Fake news!!!



Fake news outrage



Actual thing is 35% of original Outrageous Thing



Outrage all burned up https://t.co/CpAaF1a9SP

— Kilgore Trout (@KT_So_It_Goes) February 17, 2017

The rub is that the exhaustion is real whether the outrage is justified or not. It’s hard to divine whether this is the White House’s intent, but it is clearly the case that the constant stream of scandal and controversy emitting from the president has in some ways helped him. As a candidate, Trump survived multiple scandals and gaffes that were worse than fatal missteps for other candidates. Yet he kept plugging, in part because there was never time for a story to really settle in before the next one arrived.

As for the memo itself, it is probably most interesting as a window into how Kelly will try to turn Trump’s campaign promises, and his notably vague border-security executive order, into actions. Some of them will likely prove impossible, beginning with a true wall along the dimensions Trump suggested during the campaign. Others, like the memo’s discussion of adding 5,000 new border guards, are fairly easily realizable. These questions will determine whether Trump can keep his promises about the border, and the memo is one useful tool in trying to answer them. But it’s hard to puzzle those answers out when the memo has already been weaponized in the war between press and president.

Steve McQueen's Unblinking Look at Life and Afterlife

The miracle of filmmaker Steve McQueen’s work is the miracle of not blinking. For 2008’s Hunger, he recorded a 17-minute uninterrupted shot of a tormented political dissident in Northern Ireland; for 2011’s Shame his camera stayed with a sex addict through every excruciating pause in conversation on a first date; for 2013’s cinematic landmark 12 Years a Slave he depicted the abuse of black men and women in bondage so exhaustively that it dared the audience to turn away. Even his Kanye West video simply trained its eye on the rapper for nearly 10 minutes as he performed alone in a room.

McQueen’s approach is not just Birdman-like formal daring. He holds his lens steady to achieve a truer sense of bodies in real time, and to give the viewer no choice but to let their mind unravel the implications behind the images.

The purest expression of this ethos is now on display at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in the first American mounting of McQueen’s 20-minute video piece Ashes, which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale. With two loops playing simultaneously on a double-sided screen hanging in a darkened room, McQueen pays close attention to a few moments in one man’s life—and even closer attention to that same man’s death.

The installation’s origins are rooted more than 15 years in the past, when McQueen was making his 2002 short film Caribs’ Leap in Grenada, the island his parents immigrated from. There, he and a cameraman met and spent a few hours at sea with a local fisherman who went by the name Ashes. The footage from that voyage, shot in the evocative fuzz of 8mm film, makes up one side of the Ashes diptych. The young man sits on the bow of an orange boat, often looking back and smiling; he stands up, balancing over choppy waters; at one point he falls into the sea and pulls himself back onboard.  

Ashes is luminous: grinning constantly, his bleached dreads picking up the orange of the hull, his bathing suit ruffling in the wind. The water shimmers a different blue than the sky that’s dotted with just a few clouds. As you watch, the sound of waves wash from speakers behind you. You’re almost there with him.

Francesca Buccaro

But you also hear incongruous noises. The sound of scraping, clanging. A voice, heavily accented, explaining something. A snatch of singing. This is the soundtrack to what’s on the other side of the screen—Ashes’s burial.

McQueen revisited Granada years after filming Caribs’ Leap and asked around about Ashes. Locals told him that the fisherman had been killed in an altercation over drugs just two months after McQueen had met him. He lay buried in a pauper’s grave; McQueen arranged his transfer to a nicer site and filmed the process of his reinterment.

And it was, indeed, a process. Shot in crisp 16mm, this side of Ashes follows workers as they dig, pour concrete, trace letters, bevel, clean, and paint. In lengthy close-up shots you watch nails being hammered and hands working cement. You see goats and a dog wandering among the greens and browns of the cemetery. You see the fabrication of the name plate—careful stenciling, chemical finishing, a laminate peeled off revealing the words “Ashes ... Entered Into Rest … 30th May 2002 ... Age: 25 Yrs.”

Steve McQueen

In voiceover, a friend relates what became of Ashes. They all lived together in “the ghetto”; Ashes was “a good guy, a brilliant guy in the ocean”; one day he happened across a stash of drugs that he believed would make him rich. Instead, he was shot over them, first in the hand, then in the back, then in the belly.

It’s on this side of Ashes that McQueen’s unrelenting documentarian approach starts to force questions. There is the painstaking labor, laid out for the viewer: How often does one considered the physical work that goes into a grave marker? The rebar, the paint, the man-hours? Then there are the existential questions. At certain points, McQueen steps back to proffer a wide shot of the graveyard. You see the other tombs; you think of the labor they took, and the lives they signify.

Ashes’s murder connects to larger fault lines of race, poverty, and colonization, and an air of tragedy is undeniable in these videos. But the murder itself is not the subject—his passing is invisible, taking up only the space between two sides of a flat surface. Such is the case for death in general: It’s an instant, much shorter than life and certainly much shorter than what’s after. It’s also a generator of story—an ending that gives shape to what came before it.

But McQueen’s films often evade the traditional strictures of stories, and this project almost seems to actively reject narrative. A news account or novelization might focus on the grisly facts of Ashes’s demise but Ashes keeps them in parentheses. There is only the grainy memory of wondrous life, playing on loop. There is only the clear and undeniable fact of what’s left behind, and the people, like McQueen, who create monuments to those gone.

Jimmy Fallon Tries to Take On Trump

For the first time since he took a late-night hosting job in 2009, Jimmy Fallon seems on rocky ground. His Tonight Show, which has led in the ratings almost every week since he took it over, is suddenly falling behind Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Fallon’s brand of celebrity and pop culture-focused comedy, which leans on jubilantly silly games and sketches, suddenly seems out of step with a moment dominated by political news. Worst of all, his YouTube views—a bedrock of his popularity with younger audiences who don’t tune in to broadcast TV—are lagging behind rivals like Colbert and Trevor Noah (though he still has a significant subscriber edge).

So it’s no surprise that Fallon, who has strived for impartiality in a late-night world dominated by partisan figures like Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee, is now trying to be tougher on Donald Trump. It’s perhaps equally unsurprising that he isn’t very good at it. Thursday night, after the president’s much discussed 77-minute press conference, practically every late-night host leapt on the opportunity to satirize it, but only Fallon went for a full impression, donning his Trump wig and bronzer for a three-minute cold open.

It hit a lot of the major touchstones for any Trump impression. “First of all, you’re all fake news,” Fallon groused as he took the podium, later reserving some praise for Fox News (or, as he dubbed it, “Faux News”). He took a sip of water with a tiny puppet arm. He joked that he had made “so much progress ... I’ve managed to make the last four weeks feel like four years.” He shook a Magic 8 Ball that prompted him to yell catchphrases like “Big League.” Other lines fell especially flat, like a joke about Elon Musk building a giant Roomba to clean up the country, or Beyoncé being named Secretary of Labor because she’s pregnant with twins.

It felt like a solid reminder of why Fallon has largely avoided political humor at The Tonight Show—it’s never been his forte. As an impressionist, going back to his time on Saturday Night Live, he’s always been strong, but he’s better at nailing a celebrity’s cadence than his overall spirit. While Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression has always felt genuinely loaded with nastiness, Fallon just works to get the President’s voice right and then delivers a performance that otherwise feels empty.

The Tonight Show is better when it defers to other performers for more hard-hitting material. The blisteringly funny New York standup comic Jo Firestone, whom the show hired as a writer in December, has done several segments as the new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, skewering the perceived incoherence of her confirmation hearings. “I’m Betsy Dee-Vose,” she starts one appearance, mispronouncing her own name (and ignoring Fallon’s attempts to correct her), “And I’m exited to be your new Secretary of Edu-Cake Boss.” She later proposes a switch to a “pamphlet-based education system.”

But still, the show’s efforts feel half-hearted and almost unnecessary given the amount of political humor already thrown at viewers every night by Fallon’s competitors. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, which airs directly after The Tonight Show, Meyers launched into a 10-minute breakdown of the press conference, which had finished just three hours before his show taped. As the host ruefully noted, his prepared “Closer Look” segment for that night on the efforts to repeal Obamacare had to be junked because of the news impact of Trump’s remarks. Late Night has become so practiced at digging into current events that the segment nonetheless felt as seamless as Fallon’s felt very tossed-off. (Meyers also got more than 1 million YouTube views within 12 hours, to Fallon’s 280,000).

No doubt, The Tonight Show is in a tough position. There’s no sign that viewer fascination with the Trump administration will let up anytime soon, but the late-night field seeking to lampoon it is only growing more crowded. Fallon’s ratings have dipped below Colbert’s, but he does maintain a narrow edge with the 18-49 year old “demo” prized by advertisers, toward whom his pop culture-focused material has always been tightly aimed. Ever since Fallon’s notorious interview of the now-president last September, which culminated in Fallon ruffling Trump’s hair with a delighted cackle, his credibility as a political satirist has been thin at best. Fallon may be best served by sticking to his strengths, and concentrating on the lighter side of the news. Unfortunately for him, in recent weeks there hasn’t been much of that to go around.

The Disappointments of The Great Wall

It’s probably safe to presume that, had he known the political climate into which he would be dropping his debut English-language film, the legendary Chinese director Zhang Yimou would have chosen a subject other than the heroism of warriors defending an immense national wall against an invasion of horrifying aliens. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to the cineplex with the army you have.

The Great Wall, a Chinese-American co-production starring Matt Damon as a European mercenary fighting (literal) monsters during the Song dynasty, could have been a marvel. Zhang has directed sophisticated dramas (Ju Dou, Raise High the Red Lantern) and thrilling action pictures (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). The cast includes talented American actors in Willem Dafoe and Pedro Pascal (who was magnificent as Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones); and Chinese stars both relatively new (Jing Tian) and firmly established (the great Andy Lau). And as a general rule, Damon is as reliably excellent a lead actor as you’ll find anywhere in Hollywood.

Alas, rather than multiply these talents productively, The Great Wall reduces them to their lowest common denominator. It’s not a terrible movie, exactly. (For one thing it’s too short to be, clocking in at a merciful 104 minutes in an era when CGI epics frequently approach twice that.) But it’s certainly not a good one.

Damon plays William, a rogue who makes the perilous journey to China in search of “black powder,” a fabled substance that can “turn air into fire.” The others in his mercenary band are all killed en route, save for Tovar (Pascal), who with William discovers an unimaginably vast wall garrisoned by selfless warriors called the “Nameless Order.” Their mission, he learns, is to protect China against the Tao Tei, hideous quadrupeds with eyeballs in their shoulder blades. (Envision a pitbull as reimagined by H.R. Giger, and you won’t be far off.) These toothy creatures hurl themselves at the wall by the thousands every 60 years, like really, really ornery cicadas.

As in the past—even in his second-tier films such as Curse of the Golden Flower—Zhang’s palette is a chromatic marvel. The defensive forces are resplendent in brightly laminated armor that would not be out of place in Marvel’s Asgard: black for foot-soldiers; red for archers; and, best of all, an all-female cadre of “crane warriors” led by Lin Mae (Jing), who take lances in hand and hurl themselves down from the high parapets like bungee-jumping amazons. There are conspicuous echoes of movies as varied as Lord of the Rings, Starship Troopers, How to Train Your Dragon, and Mulan.

Alas, Zhang’s moments of visual splendor—a battalion of hot-air balloonists, the queen-monster and her royal guard of fan-frilled monstrosities—are weighed down by a script and performances almost dutiful in their dullness. Virtually every plot development is telegraphed in advance, and to call the supporting characters two-dimensional would be to insult planar surfaces.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment is Damon, who for the first time in memory seems to have absolutely no idea what he’s doing onscreen. His character is meant to be Irish, but I would never have guessed it from his accent, which sounds like the flattened-out grumble that one occasionally gets when British actors try to play Americans. Memo to Zhang: If you’re looking for “generic white action hero” go the Pacific Rim/Godzilla route and hire Charlie Hunnam/Aaron Taylor-Johnson. (Or was it the other way around? Who among us can confidently recall?)

Indeed, Pacific Rim and Godzilla are in some ways forbears to Zhang’s disappointing film. There was a brief, misplaced controversy over whether Damon’s casting was an example of “whitewashing” akin to Tilda Swinton’s portrayal of the Tibetan “Ancient One” in Doctor Strange. It isn’t: Zhang always intended a Western actor for the role in order to broaden the film’s appeal beyond Asia. Instead, The Great Wall is a disheartening reminder (like Pacific Rim, Godzilla, the last Transformers movie, and other recent Hollywood product) of the dangers of aggressively tailoring a film to a “global audience.”

The difference, of course, is that in this case the tailoring is principally coming from a novel direction: an Asian filmmaker trying to make it big in the American market, rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, the result is comparable: dialogue, motivations, and characterizations are simplified in order to defy cultural misinterpretation—but as a result also lack any meaningful resonance or connection. And they are all in the thrall of a relentless parade of explosions and CGI effects that translate the same way into every language.

Indeed, what is most interesting about The Great Wall, apart from is its occasionally brilliant visuals, are the explicitly Zhangian elements that still remain, in both aesthetics—this could not be mistaken for an American movie—and ethos. (The theme of obeying orders for the greater good, taken to a fault in his previous works, is present in less ominous form here.) Zhang’s film is still unlikely to make much of a dent in the U.S. box office. It’s a pity that he seems to have so intently compromised his artistic vision in a misplaced effort to do just that.

Crackdown in Pakistan

Just hours after a deadly blast killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 150 others at Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Sufi shrine in southern Pakistan Thursday, the country’s military issued a series of tweets vowing “no more restraint for anyone.”

Recent Ts acts are being exec on directions from hostile powers and from sanctuaries in Afghanistan. We shall defend and respond.

— Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor (@OfficialDGISPR) February 16, 2017

On Friday, about 100 suspected militants were killed and dozens more arrested in raids across Pakistan, according to Major General Asif Ghafoor, Pakistan’s military spokesman.

Pakistan and Afghanistan share a porous border that militants have crossed easily for years. Two major groups have been involved in recent attacks inside Pakistan: The Pakistani Taliban and its offshoots and an ISIS affiliate. The Pakistani Taliban, which takes refuge in Afghanistan, has links to, but is distinct from, the Taliban operating inside Afghanistan.  The ISIS affiliate, which claimed Thursday’s attack, is present in Nangarhar, the eastern Afghan province. Pakistan reportedly launched an assault on the area Friday.  

Pakistani military authorities also said Friday they handed over a list of 76 militants present in Afghanistan, demanding their extradition. The names on the list weren’t made public, but in the past Pakistan has said members of the Pakistani Taliban, including its chief, Mullah Fazlullah, are in Afghanistan. It’s unclear if the Afghan military can do anything about it. Although the Afghan government controls Kabul and many other large cities, the Taliban and its allies enjoy wide support in more rural parts of the country, and, indeed, control large parts of Afghanistan.

Thursday’s blast at the Sufi shrine is the deadliest to have taken place in Pakistan this year and the worst since March 2016 when at least 74 people were killed at a popular park in Lahore. In attacks in 2017, 120 people have been killed in total. Just last year, Pakistan’s military launched an offensive in the tribal region that borders Afghanistan and claimed victory over militant groups that operate there. But the recent attacks dent those claims.

Most of these attacks, including a suicide bombing Monday in Lahore, which resulted in the deaths of 14 people, have been claimed by the Pakistan Taliban and its offshoots. Thursday’s attack, however, was claimed by the Islamic State through its Amaq News Agency. The shrine was especially crowded Thursday as it coincided with Dhamal, a Sufi ritual known to attract worshippers of varied faiths from across the country. Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, has a centuries-old tradition in Pakistan, but ISIS, which observes an extreme version of the faith, views Sufis as heretics—and hence worthy of attacks. Sufi shrines have also been attacked by the Taliban.

Pakistani authorities said the attacker entered the crowded shrine and threw a grenade, which failed to go off, before blowing himself up. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for national unity.

“The past few days have been hard, and my heart is with the victims," Sharif said in a statement. “But we can't let these events divide us, or scare us. We must stand united in this struggle for the Pakistani identity, and universal humanity.”

Pakistani military officials signaled the possibility of a more direct response. Qamar Bajwa, the country’s army chief, vowed that “each drop of nation’s blood shall be revenged, and revenged immediately.” Ghafoor, the military spokesman, pinned the series of attacks on “hostile powers” from neighboring Afghanistan before announcing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border’s immediate closure.

Relations between the two countries are tense. Pakistan was one of two countries that recognized the Taliban regime (the United Arab Emirates was the other), which was ousted from power after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Many Taliban members, and their al-Qaeda allies, crossed into neighboring Pakistan, from where they frequently launched attacks in Afghanistan, which was engaged in an uphill attempt to build a modern state. The Afghan government accused Pakistan of supporting the militants who carried out attacks on its soil, but Pakistan denies the accusation. More recently the roles have been reversed, with Pakistan accusing Afghanistan of providing safe havens for terrorists who carry out attacks on its side of the border.

The announced crackdown isn’t the first time Pakistan has said it will target extremists. After 70 people were killed and scores others wounded last March in a suicide bombing orchestrated by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a Pakistan Taliban splinter group, the Pakistan paramilitary announced a crackdown on Islamist militants. That crackdown appeared to work—for a time.

Does Donald Trump Hate His New Job?

Have you ever had a job you loved, but one where you felt like you’d achieved everything you could? So you looked for a new job, went through a fairly grueling application process, if you do say so yourself, got the offer. Then you started the job, and you hated it. Worse, all the tricks you’d learned in your old job seemed to be pretty much useless in the new one. Did you ever have that experience?

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Trump's News-Conference Performance

The president of the United States can sympathize.

Donald Trump held the first extended press conference of his presidency on Thursday, and it was a stunning, disorienting experience. He mused about nuclear war, escalated his feud with the press, continued to dwell on the vote count in November, asked whether a black reporter was friends with the Congressional Black Caucus, and, almost as an afterthought, .

One of the few continuous themes through the otherwise disjointed performance was how little fun Trump is having. “As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy,” Trump started in, continuing:

To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country; you see what’s going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places, low pay, low wages, mass instability overseas, no matter where you look. The middle east is a disaster. North Korea—we’ll take care of it folks; we’re going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know, I inherited a mess.

Much of the press conference proceeded as an airing of grievances, as Trump unspooled his frustrations—principally with the press, but also quite clearly with the federal judiciary, the Senate, the Democratic Party, the intelligence community, ISIS, and whoever else came to mind.

The litany of misery wasn’t always consistent. On the one hand, “Jobs have already started to surge,” he said. On the other, “Jobs are pouring out of the country.” Trump’s doomsaying on the economy cut directly against a triumphant tweet Thursday morning, in which he boasted, “Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism - even before tax plan rollout!”

There’s been a boom in the cottage industry of diagnosing the president’s mental health from afar these days, the kind of thing that shouldn’t even be done by licensed professionals, much less amateurs. But it’s hard not to suspect that Trump isn’t having a lot of fun. He’s eyed the presidency for decades, and now that he’s in the White House, he seems deeply unhappy.

And who can blame him? The administration is plagued by leaks, from rival factions sniping at each other within the West Wing to intelligence officials speaking for stories that have damaged the administration and brought down National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. (Yes, Virginia, that was this week, even though it feels like forever ago.) Trump’s signature immigration executive order has been halted by federal courts. The storied wall isn’t under construction, and Mexico still won’t pay. Several Cabinet spots remain unfilled. There’s little progress on repealing and replacing Obamacare. He is beginning to learn just how slowly the wheels of action turn in politics. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have slowly begun to agitate for investigations into various questionable Trump moves.

Trump tried to insist everything was fine. “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos,” he said. “Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine, despite the fact that I can’t get my cabinet approved.”

He argued that, in the face of the evidence, he had already accomplished much. “In each of these actions, I’m keeping my promises to the American people. These are campaign promises,” he said. “Some people are so surprised that we’re having strong borders.”

His mood and words suggested otherwise. “I’m not ranting and raving,” he ranted and raved. There are other signs of frustration. Rather than spend weekends at the White House, he has made a habit of going to Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where he apparently feels more comfortable. On Saturday, he’ll hold what his aides have described as a campaign rally, effectively starting his 2020 reelection race. These are excuses to leave Washington, but they also point to a president who misses the presidential campaign, when he was an underdog who kept beating expectations, and before he had to wrestle with the work of governing. That nostalgia manifested itself in a reverie about the election, and how no one thought he could win.

“We got 306 because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes,” he said. In fact, he got 304. “I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said, again falsely.

Trump is not alone in encountering some challenges in his early presidency. John Kennedy joked to Robert McNamara, “I'm not aware of any school for presidents.” After receiving his first classified briefing as president-elect, in 2008, Barack Obama quipped, “It’s good that there are bars on the windows here because if there weren’t, I might be jumping out.”

Nor is Trump alone in his battles with the press. “I'm kind of sitting back and enjoying Trump's war with the press,” Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff, CIA director, and defense secretary, told me recently. “I've worked in one way or another under nine presidents. There isn't one of them that had a loving relationship with the press. The nature of it is presidents hate bad stories.”

“I'm kind of sitting back and enjoying Trump's war with the press. I've worked under nine presidents. There isn't one of them that had a loving relationship with the press.”

But Trump seems to take this unusually personally, perhaps because he has always recognized the power of the media to craft his image, and so masterfully manipulated it in building his business legend and his presidential campaign. Now he can’t seem to catch a break from the press.

What about the problems he identified—ISIS, the economy, and so on: Did Trump not expect them to be intractable, thorny problems? After all, his campaign was predicated on a dark vision of America coming apart at the seams. On stumps from Arizona to Appalachia to Akron, he warned of the evils of the establishment, the threats of ISIS, the struggles of the economy. “I alone can fix it,” he pledged. Did Trump not believe his own rhetoric, or did he imagine that these problems would melt away simply by virtue of his inauguration?

The early Trump presidency has been more chaotic than any other recent launch, even the hectic first days of the Clinton administration. It’s hard to know what to make of Trump’s jeremiad, which, beneath the bluster and fury, telegraphed a plaintive frustration that he had been unable to accomplish more, and perhaps moreover to convince the press and the public that he was accomplishing more. The catch-22 for Trump is this: As his ratings obsession shows, he desperately wants to be loved. Yet that desire for approval is leading Trump toward campaign events, to Mar-a-Lago, to searingly weird press conferences—all things that distract him from getting down to the real work of governing, without which his performance and approval are unlikely to rise.