Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 5

Big Little Lies: Sex and Murder in Monterey

Big Little Lies, HBO’s twisty and absorbing new miniseries, never seems entirely sure whether it wants you to snicker at its catty cabal of Monterey mommies or to feel acutely sorry for them. On the one hand, they’re perpetually engaging in petty power plays while clutching goblets of wine and staring out at the ocean from gazillion-dollar beachfront properties. On the other, despite their immense privilege, their problems are basically the same as everyone else’s: loneliness, unhappy children, even domestic abuse. Throughout its seven episodes, the show shakes up an odd cocktail of social satire, splashy murder mystery, and absorbing emotional drama, and the result is strangely satisfying.

The show, written and created by David E. Kelley and co-executive-produced by Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, is based on a 2014 novel by Liane Moriarty, shifting the action from a small Australian town to the picturesque California coast. Like the book, and like the ABC show Desperate Housewives—which Big Little Lies evokes in substance if not in style—the episodes are structured around a murder. Exactly who was killed and whodunnit is left a mystery. But as the show plays out, its director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) layers flashbacks detailing the buildup to the crime with clips of gossipy residents dishing the dirt on the prime suspects, who, in the words of the beleaguered school principal, aren’t so much helicopter parents as “fucking kamikazes.”

The chicklit-ish concept is elevated from the start by Vallée’s artful direction, and by the extraordinary ensemble cast. Witherspoon plays Madeline Martha Mackenzie, a firecracker of a full-time mom who lords her nurturer status over the high-powered career moms, and says things like, “I love my grudges. I tend to them like little pets.” Kidman is Celeste, an enigmatic former lawyer whose husband (Alexander Skarsgaard) increasingly crosses the line between fiery passion and physical violence. Jane (Shailene Woodley) is a younger single mom who moves to Monterey in hopes of giving her son, Ziggy, a top-class education. When Madeline and Jane meet at first-grade orientation, their bond is unexpected but swift, encouraged by the fact that Jane is victimized by Renata (Laura Dern), an executive mom bragging about boardroom battles and Hamilton tickets.

The dialogue in the first episode tends to be over-theatrical (“You’re intrinsically a nice person—I have a nose for these things,” Madeline tells Jane, with Witherspoon evoking her Cecily Cardew more than her Tracy Flick). In building its universe filled with Porsche Cayennes and personal rivalries, Big Little Lies keeps its primary characters at a distance. But as it continues, the show benefits from letting them reveal their humanity. Witherspoon excels as Madeline, finding the sympathetic side of a character who could easily be a monster in the hands of a less adept performer. Dern’s Renata, too, zigzags deftly between exaggerated displays of oneupmanship and the despair of realizing no one likes her.

Vallée builds up Woodley’s Jane as the center of the mystery, weaving in flashbacks and dream sequences that hint at a tragic and ugly event in her past. On the sidelines is Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz), the earth mom married to Madeline’s ex, whose character is largely used as a device to infuriate Madeline. But it’s Kidman, unsurprisingly, whose plot is the most enthralling. She puts extra gloss on the veneer of her happy home, putting concerted effort into sunset selfies and super-styled casual wear. But in visits to a therapist, who pokes at the holes in her perfect life in scenes that are impeccably paced, Kidman contributes to one of the most complex and thoughtful portrayals of domestic abuse in recent memory.

If Vallée has a weakness, it’s for the Pacific Ocean, which features so prominently in the show that it should get top billing. Big Little Lies relies heavily on tricks—jarring sound effects, false flashbacks, echoes—to bolster its central mystery, but the moments tend to undermine what the show can do at its best, which is to lay bare the dynamics of female relationships, good and bad. To enjoy it necessitates swallowing down any sense of suspicion at the fact that money doesn’t seem to be an issue for anyone in the show, even Jane. The flip side is that the show’s own obvious display of wealth—its extravagant production and loaded cast—set it above so many other TV dramas. There’s so much to appreciate, even if, like Madeline and Jane’s precocious kids, you frequently end up rolling your eyes at the absurdity of it all.

Trump's News-Conference Performance

President Trump used a news conference ostensibly meant to his new choice to head the U.S. Department of Labor to rail against intelligence leaks that have connected his aides to Russia, explain why he fired Mike Flynn as his national-security adviser, and defend the rollout of his executive order on immigration.  

Trump also used the occasion to launch a broadside on the media, bemoan the state of the country and the world he inherited (“I inherited a mess at home and abroad”), and cited the gains he’s made in the three weeks he's been in the White House. He also declined to criticize the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S., appearing to attribute some of the them to “our opponents.”

It was a classic Trump performance, a return to the many themes from the campaign trail that ultimately won him the White House. He presented himself as a leader willing to work with anyone, one who would show “great heart” in dealing with children in the country illegally, only to find himself thwarted by the Democrats and the “hateful” media.

Several reporters asked Trump about the contacts his aides reportedly had with Russian intelligence officials. Trump dismissed those stories as “fake news,” a “ruse” to detract from Hillary Clinton’s loss in the election, and denied he had any business or personal ties to anyone in Russia. When asked if he could definitively say if any of his aides were in touch with Russia during the presidential campaign, he said: “Not that I know of.”

Russia, who Trump appeared to court during the presidential campaign, has been one of the main sources of controversy since his inauguration less than a month ago. The nature of the conversations Flynn had with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. ultimately resulted in the national-security adviser’s resignation from the post just 24 days after he assumed the position. Flynn is reported to have misled Vice President Mike Pence about what he discussed with the envoy, saying that recently imposed sanctions levied in retaliation for Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 election never came up. That led to an embarrassing televised appearance in which Pence falsely stated the Flynn and Kislyak never discussed sanctions.

Trump insisted Flynn had done nothing wrong, noting that while he did not explicitly ask the retired Army general to discuss U.S. sanctions on Russia with the ambassador, he “would have done.” The conversation, he said, was appropriate. “I fired him because of what he said to Mike Pence,” Trump said.

The president also lambasted the almost daily leaks in the media about the administration’s actions, calling them “a criminal act,” and he chastised the media.

“It’s an illegal process and the press should be ashamed of itself,” Trump said. He used the occasion to criticize coverage of him, calling it “fake news.” Asked if the leaks that were being published were fake, too, he said: “The leaks are real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.” He said the Justice Department would investigate the leaks, and predicted the leaks would now stop.

On several questions, Trump returned to some of the themes he’s touched upon in past news conferences: the size of his electoral-college victory (he mistakenly claimed it was the largest since President Reagan), Clinton (“Does anyone really think Hillary Clinton would be tougher on Russia?”), his own administration’s performance (“This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”), and the refusal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reinstate his travel ban on visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

“The rollout of the order was perfect,” he said, dismissing the reports of chaos, the massive protests, and the legal challenges to his executive order. He said his administration would issue a new order next week tailored to the court’s “bad decision.”

In a bizarre moment at the news conference, Trump was asked by a reporter from an ultra-Orthodox  publication about the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. He asked the reporter to “sit down,” criticized the question, stating that he was neither anti-Semitic nor racist. When pressed on the matter by another reporter, who raised the issue of bomb threats called into synagogues and swastikas appearing across the country, Trump replied: “Some of it is put up by our opponents.”

Trump’s critics will likely have watched his replies in either dismay or mirth, but the president has used such occasions to great effect in reaching out to his supporters, many of whom are convinced the media are incapable of giving Trump fair coverage.

“The press has become so dishonest that if don't talk about it, we’re doing the American people a great disservice,” Trump said, adding: “I’m here to take my message straight to the people.”

It’s likely he did.

How Hans Zimmer Became a Rock Star

Like many other late-night hosts, Stephen Colbert introduces the musical acts that close out his show while holding their CD in his hands. His recent guests have included Japandroids, A$AP Mob, and Billy Joel, but Tuesday’s episode was a bit different: The album Colbert was promoting was the soundtrack to Planet Earth II (the much-anticipated BBC America nature documentary series), and the act was the composer Hans Zimmer, jamming on the synthesizer as the orchestra behind him played the program’s theme music. For a film composer to appear on a talk show is practically unheard of. But this is Zimmer, who’s about to embark on a national tour that will include performances at Coachella, the California music festival being headlined this year by Radiohead, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar.

Zimmer has worked in the movie business since the mid-1980s, winning an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1995 (for The Lion King) and receiving nine other nominations. But at some point in the last few years, he’s become the genuine successor to John Williams—a composer well-known enough to approach the status of a household name, and the go-to choice for soaring themes for superheroes and big-budget science fiction movies. Just what prompted Zimmer’s leap to superstardom, and how did he draw the kind of young audience needed to end up on the Coachella bill?

Zimmer’s big break in the movie industry was Rain Man (1988), after which he became a studio workhorse, churning out five to six scores a year for films like Driving Miss Daisy, Days of Thunder, Thelma & Louise, and A League of Their Own, before developing the instrumental score for The Lion King. He was known for collaborating with world musicians like the South African composer Lebo M (whose voice you might recognize from the start of the song “Circle of Life”), Melanesian choir singers from the Solomon Islands (who contributed to his masterful work for The Thin Red Line), and the Australian instrumentalist Lisa Gerrard (who worked with him on the operatic tones of 2000’s Gladiator).

It was Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winner Gladiator that really established Zimmer’s reputation as a go-to hire for big-budget epics, and began to cement his status as the pre-eminent composer of his generation. Zimmer had initially been a synthesizer player who often didn’t work with an orchestra at all; he created his Driving Miss Daisy score entirely by himself. But Gladiator’s sweeping battle music incorporated wailing female vocals, a kind of Armenian flute called a duduk, and thunderous drumming, all of which became oft-used tropes, both for Zimmer and his contemporaries. A German musician named Klaus Badelt contributed to the soundtrack; he became one of Zimmer’s many protégés to hit it big in Hollywood, working on Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003.

Another protégé was Ramin Djawadi, whom Zimmer mentored at his film-score company Remote Control Productions. After working with Zimmer for years, Djawadi has become one of the few other composers who can pack an arena to listen to his movie and TV scores; he’s the man behind Game of Thrones’s vast library of music, which is also currently on a U.S. tour. If Zimmer has become a big name for epic film, Djawadi is his counterpart in television, also working on HBO’s Westworld and FX’s The Strain, though many of his film scores (particularly his work on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim) have also drawn praise.

Zimmer’s partners at Remote Control work all over Hollywood: There’s Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) of Mad Max: Fury Road, Harry Gregson-Williams (The Martian, the Narnia franchise), Henry Jackman (a favorite of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), and John Powell (best known for his work in animated films). Zimmer’s synthesizer-heavy approach has become so recognizable partly because his acolytes are doing similar work throughout the industry. But as the Remote Control team has helped to replicate his bombastic style, making the Zimmer sound synonymous with widescreen action, Zimmer himself has branched off in some fascinating directions.

Zimmer’s body of work is so staggering, and the variety of his efforts so broad, that he’s become increasingly difficult to peg.

The point at which he became truly ubiquitous was his collaboration with Christopher Nolan. Zimmer worked on all three of the director’s Batman films (the first two in collaboration with James Newton Howard), taking a superhero who already had very famous theme music (composed by Danny Elfman for Tim Burton’s Batman movie) and reinventing him from the ground up. Zimmer’s superhero work swerves away from the more august, Wagner-esque romanticism of John Williams’s famous scores; his top-tier work for The Dark Knight Rises is layered with drums, chanting choruses, and mournful minor-key strings.

Alongside the Batman movies, Nolan made Inception, his 2010 blockbuster set in the world of dreams. Zimmer’s electronic score was embellished by the former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr playing a 12-string guitar. Most tracks featured elements of Edith Piaf’s song “Non, je ne regrette rien” slowed down to a groaning crawl, as the recording is an important element in the film’s plot. Inception featured the rumbling “BRAAAM” sound that has become pervasive in Hollywood, especially in film advertising. It’s then that Zimmer became recognizable even among teenage fans online; there’s little doubt that Inception’s track “Time,” his most popular on Spotify, will be the grandiloquent closer of his Coachella set.

As quickly as people have copied Zimmer’s sound, he’s moved to re-invent it. His Oscar-nominated score for Sherlock Holmes (2009) is a wonderfully baroque piece of superhero music, reliant on the banjo, squeaky violins, and a broken piano that Zimmer destroyed himself in search of the right tone. For The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Hidden Figures he’s collaborated with the hip-hop artist and producer Pharrell Williams, working strenuously to avoid the predictable sounds of each genre (superhero and inspirational drama). Over the last 20 years, Zimmer has worked on box-office hits spanning all genres, and his willingness to adapt with the times has helped define his generational appeal.

When Nolan began work on his space epic Interstellar (2014), he asked Zimmer to write the music before looking at the script, telling him only the movie’s broadest story themes. Zimmer came back with a piece of organ music, which Nolan dubbed “the heart of the movie,” and the two worked in tandem from then on, with Zimmer providing music for scenes the minute they were shot (usually, film scores are composed well after shooting has concluded). His Interstellar score might be the best of his career—a Philip Glass-esque piece that builds atmosphere not through sheer volume and intensity, but through repetitive, discordant organ melodies that grow increasingly alien the farther the film’s action gets from Earth.

Like any composer, Zimmer will sometimes lean back into familiar territory. His work on Zack Snyder’s Superman films is loud and crunching, but somewhat unremarkable outside of its excellent main theme. He worked on each of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks’s Robert Langdon movies, including 2016’s Inferno, without much distinction. But his body of music is so staggering, and the variety of his efforts so broad, that he’s become increasingly difficult to peg. A glimpse of his work on Colbert’s show might seem like that of any Hollywood composer, but as his forthcoming tour—and his Coachella appearances—will likely prove, it’s anything but.

Trump's New Pick for Secretary of Labor: Alexander Acosta

President Trump announced Thursday he is nominating Alexander Acosta as secretary of labor, moving fast to bounce back from Andrew Puzder’s failed nomination.

Acosta, the son of Cuban immigrants, is an experienced former government employee, having served on the National Labor Relations Board, led the civil-rights division of the Justice Department, and served as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida during the George W. Bush administration. If confirmed, he will give the Trump Cabinet its first Hispanic appointee. Acosta served as a law clerk to current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito when Alito was serving as a federal appellate judge. Acosta is currently the dean of the law school at Florida International University.

Related Story

Why the Puzder Nomination Fell Apart

Trump announced the appointment with an unusually brief, vague comment at the start of a White House press conference Thursday afternoon. Acosta was not present.

“He has had a tremendous career,” Trump said. “I’ve wished him the best, we just spoke. I think he’ll be a tremendous secretary of labor.”

Trump wasted little time in announcing Acosta’s appointment, which came less than 24 hours after the withdrawal of Puzder, who is chief executive of the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. His nomination, already looking troubled, collapsed Wednesday when it became clear that too many Republicans refused to support his nomination. Trump did not make so much as a statement about Puzder’s departure.

In a statement, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce called Acosta “an outstanding choice for this cabinet position.”

The speed raises questions about the White House nomination process—Puzder, after all, seems to have been insufficiently vetted. But Acosta looks like a much safer, more conventional pick than most of Trump’s nominees, and crucially, he has already been confirmed by the Senate for previous posts, which usually indicates a smoother process.

Acosta’s most immediately applicable resume line seems to be his service on the NLRB, which ran for approximately nine months between December 2002 and August 2003. The board, an independent federal agency with members appointed by the president, oversees issues like collective bargaining and union disputes.

He was then named assistant attorney general, the first Hispanic to hold that title, overseeing the civil-rights division. He was endorsed for that post by a wide range of groups, including the Hispanic Bar Association, the Arab American Institute, and the National Council of La Raza, which called Acosta “a bridge-builder, not only with the Latino community but with other ethnic and racial groups, adding that while “We may not agree with everything that Mr. Acosta has done or will do, but we are certain that he is someone who will listen and act in a fair manner.”

Nonetheless, his stint at the Justice Department will likely be a locus of criticism for Democrats. The Bush Justice Department, and particularly the Civil Rights Division, were shaken by a scandal over improper politicization of the hiring process, as well as unlawful firings of U.S. attorneys. Acosta’s deputy was Bradley Schlozman. A Justice inspector general’s report “found that Schlozman inappropriately considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring experienced attorneys in the sections he supervised and entry-level attorneys throughout the Division for the Attorney General’s Honors Program.” Acosta denied knowledge of Schlozman’s transgressions, though some colleagues disputed that.

In 2005, President Bush appointed Acosta U.S. Attorney in Florida’s southern district, which includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Key West. Among his notable prosecutions were the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and aspiring terrorist Jose Padilla. He also extracted a $780 million fine from UBS, the Swiss bank, in a fraud and conspiracy case. In 2009, Acosta became dean of law at FIU.

It is tempting, if premature, to view Acosta’s appointment as the beginning of a course correction toward a more cautious, traditional appointment process at the White House. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, forced out this week for misrepresenting conversations with the Russian ambassador, had been seen by some corners of the national-security establishment as something of a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. The reported frontrunner for his old post, Admiral Robert Harward, is a respected, sober figure. In lieu of Puzder, whose nomination fell apart amid questions about hiring of illegal immigrants and decades-old allegations of spousal abuse, Trump is selecting a well-respected public servant—a conservative pick in the non-political sense of the word.  Acosta is unlikely to win the hearts and minds of Democrats, but he will make a much more difficult target for them, and he should find support among congressional Republicans disconcerted by the rocky start to the Trump administration.

How The Blood of Emmett Till Still Stains America Today

What does American tyranny look like? In the past few months, fears about the collapse or degradation of the American democratic system have led many to engage in the grim exercise of game-planning the endgame of tyranny. For some, dystopian novels ground that exercise. Some take stock of the rise of authoritarian powers in the past. Others rely on expert realpolitik analysis from political minds like my colleague David Frum. Regardless of the source, we have arrived at Belshazzar’s feast. The writing is on the wall: It could happen here.

Or, it could happen here again. After all, it wasn’t too long ago in American history that millions of Americans were trampled under the heel of a repressive, anti-democratic kleptocracy and faced economic reprisals, violence, or death for any dissent. And nowhere was the iron grip of that system—known as Jim Crow to some of us—stronger than in Mississippi. That grip manifested itself most notoriously in the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, in 1955. That year, Till was tortured and lynched by white men after allegedly making lewd comments toward a white woman. His mutilated corpse became one of the first mass-media images of the violence of Jim Crow, and the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy. And through protests across the country, Till’s broken body became a powerful symbol of the civil-rights movement.

In his new book, The Blood of Emmett Till, the historian Timothy B. Tyson revisits the circumstances of Till’s death, and brings to bear a wide scope of reporting, historical research, and cultural analysis. It’s not a definitive history of the Till case; other works have synthesized more primary sources and firsthand accounts. Rather, The Blood of Emmett Till is focused on the historicity of race in America: It posits that Till’s death is an emblem of the ways in which American tyranny works. To that end, the climax of his book comes not in the death of Till, in the ensuing sweltering court proceedings, or in the backwoods thriller of the black Mississippi Underground that investigated the case, but in the present.

Tyson tells the story of how a young Chicago boy’s summer sojourn in Mississippi ended with him kidnapped, beaten, shot, and tossed into a river by Roy Bryant, J.W. Milam, and a group of others. The historical context Tyson provides often dwarfs the actual tick-tock of the case: An account of Mamie Till-Mobley’s childhood and her close bond with her son is wrapped in a narrative about the Great Migration of black people from the South to the West and North in the mid-20th century. Till’s lynching is backgrounded by an instructive history of the genteel and intellectually racist Citizens’ Councils and how they fueled the raw violence of a white proletariat. The surfeit of contextualization verges on digression at times, but serves the ultimate purpose of giving Till’s life weight six decades after his death.

The effect of Tyson’s wide-angled framing is especially pronounced in the bombshell revelation that Carolyn Bryant—the white woman who originally claimed Till grabbed and sexually harassed her in her husband’s store—lied about those claims. Media coverage has focused on that explosive admission and the conversation around redemption that it seems to spark, but Tyson’s book, in the end, is largely unconcerned with that line of inquiry. Bryant’s testimony on the stand and her later admission have little to do, in this narrative, with her own battle with guilt; rather, they serve to advance Tyson’s thesis that culpability for Till’s death rests on millions of shoulders. The unlikely thing, he argues, was not that Emmett Till was lynched, but that his lynching actually stirred a national response.

Tyson implores readers to learn that American tyranny already has a face.

Tyson takes great pains to illustrate how the mechanisms working in Jim Crow Mississippi in 1955 still animate life today, and how America has never really found justice for Till. He details the rise of the civil-rights movement and how Till’s death helped to forge a common purpose for the wide-ranging and often contentious factions of black activism. He describes how white supremacist organizing arose in direct response to that mobilization. And he examines how school desegregation and black suffrage undergirded the social tensions of the Jim Crow era.

Perhaps most importantly, Tyson considers all the ways in which an American populace was complicit in its acceptance of violence against black people—and then considers all the ways in which it is still complicit in the deaths of people of color today. For instance, in his examination of the Citizens’ Councils’ literature, which fomented mass fears of black criminality and fantasies of rampant black sexual deviancy, Tyson also shows how poor white “peckerwoods” were loathed by wealthier white people, and manipulated into doing the bloody business of physical violence. In this, he provides a thinly veiled parable for today’s politics in how the rhetoric of white supremacy—even in its subtlest dog-whistle form—is used to radicalize people, and how the uneasy detente between classes of white people is often maintained by propaganda built around the threat of the other, even as the culpability is passed to the lowest rungs. “We blame them,” Tyson writes about those radicalized perpetrators of physical violence, “to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.”

In service of his analysis of the present, Tyson also compares the “Emmett Till generation” of civil-rights leaders that developed after Till’s death to the Black Lives Matter movement that gathered force after the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In The Blood of Emmett Till, that comparison is not just a coincidence, but, rather, the end result of a social system that continues to perpetuate injustice today. “America is still killing Emmett Till,” Tyson writes, “often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.”

The Blood of Emmett Till is a critical book not just because it provides a good reason to revisit a foundational moment in American history—though it manages that feat in spades—but also because it manages to turn the past into prophecy and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren’t often enough asked to do with history: learn from it. In firmly tying Till’s legacy to protests over black bodies, re-segregation, voting-rights struggles, hate crimes, and the creeping reemergence of bigotry today, Tyson implores readers to learn that American tyranny already has a face, has already left millions of victims in its wake, and doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to fathom. Perhaps the dystopia we envision isn’t some far-off future, but simply a return to the past.

Music to Celebrate the 30-Something Blues

“Being in your thirties is like your teenage years, but without all the cool role models,” the Swedish singer Jens Lekman writes in the press notes for his excellent fourth album, Life Will See You Now. “When you were a teenager you had the Ramones. When you’re in your thirties you have the characters from Seinfeld.”

He’s not the first to notice that the 30s are an awkward spot when it comes to cultural depictions. The grand narratives of rebellion and searching in the teens and 20s disappear; the culture’s expectations becoming fuzzier, having to do with career and parenthood and stability but little passion.

Lekman would seem like an ideal artist to remedy this situation. He writes with an eye that can indeed be called Seinfeldian: One song of his salutes the intimacy of a haircut, while another recounts the dangers of slicing an avocado. But these aren’t jaded tales. Lekman infuses them with extreme emotion using a schmaltzy, over-enunciated baritone and piled-high disco arrangements; he probably wouldn’t be offended if you compared his sound to Rick Astley.

On 2007’s Night Falls Over Kortedala, an opulent and hilarious collection that solidified his cult fanbase, he sang, “I would never kiss anyone who doesn’t burn me like the sun,” and made the listener believe it. That was Lekman at 25; a decade years later, can he bring that same headrush to a life period associated popularly with ladder-climbing, comfort, and mounting regrets?

The answer is that he sort of can. But mostly he is not interested in dispelling the stereotype of post-20s blues—because the stereotype seems to have rung true to his life experience. His under-appreciated 2012 album, I Know What Love Isn’t, quietly analyzed a breakup; he spent 2015 trying to vanquish writer’s block by recording a song a week. Now comes the beautiful and brutal Life Will See You Now, a head-on confrontation with nameless malaise where the music, if not the words, insists that there’s joy in midlife crisis and 3D-printed tumors.

To portray emotional struggle with such a jaunty palette is a conscious choice.

Yes, 3D-printed tumors. The remarkable second track, “Evening Prayer,” tells of Lekman grabbing a beer with a friend who recently beat cancer and fabricated a replica of his malignancy; “it’s rugged gray plastic, it looks lunar,” Lekman describes over Jackson 5 doo-dee-doos and light funk guitar. Partly the song is about male platonic affection and the ambiguity of adult friendships—has Lekman been supportive enough through his pal’s struggle? Has he been allowed to be? But partly it is about facing the unfaceable, of making the hidden threat a visible one.

“A lot of my anxieties and fears are things that are very abstract,” Lekman explained to NPR. “Of the times that I’ve been able to overcome a fear, it’s been by making it something that I can understand, that I can hold on to—just something that’s more tangible.” This is the M.O. of much of his catalogue, and really of much of great art. Lekman wrestles again with it on the relatively spare “Postcard #17.” “If you just say its name / three times in front of the mirror / its pale face will appear,” he sings of something that’s been keeping him up at night. What exactly was it? The listener doesn’t get to hear, but the track is nevertheless an exorcism: Eventually, he rules that his problem was “fucking ridiculous.”

Those songs show Lekman’s gift for symbols, but his most powerful gut-punches often come from more concrete short stories. The magnificent “Wedding in Finistère” tells of marriage-reception smalltalk that turns existentialist; the song’s groove switches from strutting power pop to a hurried tropical rhythms as Lekman telescopes from the here-and-now to the eternal:

I felt like a five-year-old watching the ten-year-olds shoplifting

Ten-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds French kissing

Fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds chain-smoking

Twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing

That last line might read as heartbreaking, as does the sentiment of the bridge: “Oh, please, distract me from every life unlived.” But you never forget that this is a wedding song, with tropical rhythms and warm chords creating an atmosphere of celebration.

To portray emotional struggle with such a jaunty palette is a conscious choice, and Lekman portrays it as such. “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” is yet another song about hanging out with yet another mopey friend; together, they decide to “live a little” by, per the title, breaking into a ferris wheel. Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn plays the friend, imploring, “If you’re gonna write a song about this then please don’t make it a sad song.” Lekman assents, hence the tone of the song, and of Life Will See You Now more broadly. “There is a feeling on this album as if I was aware that every time I write a song, I have the power to decide if it’s going to be a happy memory or a sad memory,” Lekman has explained. “If there is a way out or not.”

The way out is as clear as it’ll ever be on the album’s opener, another impeccably produced Abba- and Burt Bacharach-indebted reverie of strings and swooning choruses. The song travels back to an August morning in Gothenburg, 1997, when a teenaged Lekman encountered a Mormon missionary. They didn’t talk about religion per se but about purpose; the missionary’s lucky “to know what you’re here for, to know who you’re serving, to know what to do.” The young Lekman tells the stranger that if his musical career doesn’t work out, he’ll become a social worker: “In a world of mouths, I want to be an ear.” Since the time described in that song, Lekman has been both mouth and ear, voicing the struggles of life while remaining tuned to the hum of being alive.

Miss Manners on Rudeness in the Age of Trump

People are mighty touchy nowadays about how they are treated, and quick to condemn accidents or confusion as rudeness. Being pushed against someone in a crowded bus is as likely to inspire a loud denunciation as an accepted apology. Wedding invitations may be received as insults because the recipients’ choice of honorifics (Mr. and Mrs., Ms., Dr., or none)  or altered surnames (in hyphenated or blended families) was not known.

Naturally, this sensitivity to etiquette does not extend to improved behavior on the part of the offended. On the contrary, it often inspires retaliatory rudeness. Rather, the burden of decorum has been carried by so-called role models.

These are not always well-chosen. It is hard to remember that movie stars were once considered role model material, and their studios put considerable effort into maintaining that they led wholesome lives. Sports stars lasted somewhat longer in the public imagination, but an accumulation of accusations of domestic and extra-domestic violence has tainted that.

Politicians may not be full role models in the sense that no responsible parent would urge a child to be one. It is more like “You could grow up to be President— or whatever you want,” with the emphasis on the latter. But statesmen have  nevertheless been expected to behave themselves. Sex scandals, financial shenanigans, and the derision of entire segments of the population destroyed political careers—at least until the perpetrators were able to claim that these were symptoms of an illness for which they had hurriedly received therapy.

History, moving more slowly than today’s electronically empowered gossip, keeps revealing the disconnect between morals and manners. But oddly, it is the manners violations that often cause downfalls. Provided that the moral transgression is not too creepy—usually meaning that it involves children, prostitutes, public bathrooms, pornography, or some pithy combination—astonishing comebacks have been made by means of a penitent but dignified demeanor.

Manners transgressions have always been harder to live down. A single instance of screaming doomed the 2004 presidential campaign of Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Gaffes that smacked of jeering, bullying, or defaming brought down many a political career. There is only so much credibility left in the Context Excuse—claiming that you didn’t say what you are recorded to have said, which is being replayed all over the internet.

So why did so many citizens elect a president of the United States who unabashedly—even proudly—violated those expectations?

Some claim that they voted for reasons in spite of such personal behavior. But in listening to the partisans’ spirited enthusiasm, it is impossible to escape the realization that for many, it was because of such behavior.

This is a startling change. We now know about crude behavior on the part of past presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and others, going back in time, as history keeps being unearthed. But these transgressions were not widely known by the public in their respective times.

Nevertheless, in spite of the glamorization of outlaws and gangsters, people do not naturally think that their leaders should violate the standards to which they subscribe. We still pay obeisance to virtue. What has happened is that the virtues have been redefined.

We now have Alternate Virtues:

1. Authenticity (formerly Vulgarity)

This is a newly popular concept, born of disillusionment. So many public figures have been caught doing or saying something hypocritical that paragons no longer seem plausible. So if you know enough dreadful things about someone, perhaps you have hit bottom and will be spared the shock of further revelations.     

2. Frankness (formerly Discretion)

Speaking one’s mind has come to be considered praiseworthy, regardless of the  quality of what is expressed. Wholesale insults of segments of the society had generally been considered unfit for public consumption, however sincerely felt, but now the sincerity is the important part.

3. Honesty (formerly Respect)

This is the person-to-person version of saying it all. Nobody is in favor of dishonesty, but the pre-social media era, when people were told that their personal problems were all due to a lack of communication, spread the idea that there was something admirable about insulting people to their faces.

4. Safety (formerly Due Process)

As no one really knows how to combat terrorism, there are those who believe that we can only be saved if we fight as dishonorably as our enemies.

5. Open-mindedness (formerly Scholarship)

The concept of relativity has strangely given rise to the belief that the emotional power of moral conviction elevates arguments above facts.

6. Assertiveness (formerly Fairness)

Observing minorities using solidarity and pride to bind together and protest discrimination has given members of the majority the idea that the technique can be applied to competing with them at this to obtain additional advantages.

7. Humility (formerly Discernment)

This is the modern virtue that has, at least in theory, effectively replaced Exercising Judgment with Not Being Judgmental. Of course, people keep judging one another. But for those to whom they wish to give a pass, the who-am-I-to-judge rationale is applied.

8. Forgiveness (formerly Reputation)

We have seen saintly examples of victims and their bereaved forgiving the responsible criminals. But in the case of public figures, the concept has expanded. It no longer means giving the person a chance to repent and show better behavior, but rather erasing the record, to the extent that even mentioning it is considered to be in bad taste. Thus the person who has behaved badly has the same claim to public trust as the one who has behaved well all along.

9. Achievement (formerly Overcoming Obstacles)

The hope is that prosperity is catching, so the ideal life story for a public figure is about achieving success from poor origins, preferably not with major legal setbacks. But the dazzle of riches can be enough to obscure the journey.

10. Entertainment (formerly Setting an Example)

Having had eight years of a dignified president with an exemplary family life, people are hungry for the pleasures of scandal.

And finally—

11. Acting Out (formerly Acting Presidential)

Trump Kicks Off His 2020 Reelection Campaign on Saturday

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was a work of virtuoso improvisation: Even though it seemed to be in permanent chaos, with frequent changes of leadership, perpetual gaffes, and a strategy devised on the fly, the Republican managed to defeat the elaborate, best-and-brightest, data-wonk team of Hillary Clinton.

If the early indications hold, it doesn’t look like Trump is going to fly on a wing and a prayer again in 2020. In fact, he’s kicking the campaign off on Saturday, with a rally in Melbourne, Florida:

Join me in Florida this Saturday at 5pm for a rally at the Orlando-Melbourne International Airport!

Tickets: https://t.co/9jDy1tYkgE pic.twitter.com/GDhO6GGxwt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

For those of you not keeping score at home, that means Trump is hosting his first rally of the 2020 campaign just 29 days into his presidency.

The idea of a “permanent campaign” has been floating around American political circles since 1980, when Sidney Blumenthal used it as the title for a book. It was during the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom Blumenthal advised, that the idea really came into practice. Even by the standards of modern-day presidents, Clinton loved politicking, and his team held on to campaign methods once in the White House, famously calling on polling to help determine its course. Newt Gingrich helped Republicans capture the House in 1994, in part by adopting the same tactics. Each of Clinton’s successors has adopted the permanent-campaign mentality to some degree.

Yet Trump’s choice to hold a campaign rally less than a month into his presidency breaks new ground. Where his predecessors practiced electoral politics between cycles, none was willing to do so as baldly, as quickly, as Trump. Barack Obama realized, like Trump, that he thrived off large audiences, and he made liberal use of the major speech, even early in his term: In February 2009, he made several trips to promote the stimulus package and his agenda. But Obama’s events were political by implication, while outwardly aimed at boosting specific policies.

Trump by contrast is planning a straightforward campaign-style rally on Saturday. It’s at an airport, in a swing state, and it’s being advertised through his campaign website. His press secretary even called it a campaign event. Making the event a campaign event rather than a speech might afford Trump greater flexibility in who he allows to attend and who he excludes. It means that the Trump campaign will likely pick up some of the travel tab, rather than taxpayers. But it might also grant Trump more leeway to make straightforwardly political arguments and attacks that it might be unseemly for a president to make at an official event—though Trump has shown such little regard for those unwritten rules that it’s hard to imagine he could be significantly more strident.

The rally isn’t even the first step the president has taken toward a 2020 campaign. In the days between his election and his inaugural, Trump held a victory lap series of rallies, mimicking the format and even the stump speech (such as it was) that Trump used during the campaign. He also made great show of supposedly selecting, and then asking his lawyer to trademark, a slogan for the 2020 campaign while in the midst of an interview with The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty. (“Keep America Great,” but then you knew that, right?) Trump even filed papers to run for reelection on Inauguration Day.

Trump runs the risk of appearing presumptuous in beginning his campaign at so early a date. After all, shouldn’t one master the art of governing before one begins to campaign for a second tour? The White House is, by all accounts, in a state of chaos. On Monday, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign after misleading the vice president and the American people about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. On Wednesday, Trump’s nominee for labor secretary withdrew when it became clear he could not be confirmed. Federal courts have brought Trump’s signature immigration executive order to a halt. Isn’t there enough in Washington for Trump to attend to?

That is, most likely, the point. It’s hard for Trump to find many friends. As fiercely as the media objected to Steve Bannon’s accusation that they represented the “opposition party,” the animosity between press and president is undeniable. Republicans in Congress are increasingly frustrated with the White House’s stumbles, and in some cases is calling for investigations into matters, from Kellyanne Conway’s apparent flouting of ethics rules to the Flynn affair to question of lax security at Mar-a-Lago. More importantly, Trump can say he doesn’t believe the polls until he’s blue in the face, but he is obsessively attentive to them, as he frequently reveals, and his approval rating is miserable—and not just inside the Beltway.

Going to Orlando for a big campaign-style rally is a chance to put both the president and his supporters back into a more salubrious state of mind. It’s a way for Trump to try to regain his swagger, but it’s also a bid to enliven the base that brought him to the White House. It’s a test to see whether the “Silent Majority” he boasted during the campaign can give him the energy he needs to govern as a successful president. Time and again during the presidential campaign, returning to his crowds helped Trump get on track. This weekend, he’ll try to figure out whether those campaign tactics can work when they’re made permanent.

Game Theory

In his book Rules of the Game: Quiz Shows and American Culture, the communications professor Olaf Hoerschelmann suggests how neatly American game shows have reflected the times that produced them. The radio quiz shows popular in the 1930s and 1940s used “man on the street”-framed trivia questions to bring a sense of democratization and intimacy to the country’s new mass medium. The TV shows of the ’50s tapped into the geopolitical anxieties of their age to emphasize, as Hoerschelmann puts it, “the hegemonic project of cold war education policy” and its “focus on Anglo-American elite culture.” The sober sets of series like The $64,000 Question and Twenty-One—and, in general, the well-spoken, well-educated contestants the shows’ producers selected to participate in them—effected an air of patriotic sobriety. In their soft celebrations of enlightenment, the game shows suggested all that was at stake in the fight for “the free world.”

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The Misunderstood History of the Wacky Japanese Game Show

Today, we tend to associate with “game shows” the form they took after the quiz show scandals of the later ’50s eroded Americans’ trust not just in the shows themselves, but in television as a medium—the form they took after they were reinvented as generally flashy, occasionally brash, and insistently low-stakes celebrations of street smarts. During the years of post-war prosperity and their attendant increase in consumerism, game shows began to take “home economics” extremely literally. They came to air in the daytime, and they targeted themselves at the audiences who watched TV during those hours: women, for the most part. Many of them reframed their challenges around the skills required of savvy consumption. The Price Is Right, a show that cheekily glorified the soft skills of shopping, first aired in the U.S., in its current form, in 1972.

The Price Is Right lives on—not just on CBS, where the show has been hosted, since 2007, by Drew Carey, but also, as of late 2016, in the form of its most popular game: Plinko. The show’s slanted, peg-studded wall has been reimagined, this time by NBC, as a standalone game, within a standalone show: The Wall, which currently airs as part of the network’s Tuesday-night primetime lineup.

Hosted by Chris Hardwick—and executive-produced by, among others, LeBron James—The Wall is, like its forebears, both a product and a flashy reflection of its times. It loves drama. It involves, yes, trivia. Featuring couples (married partners, siblings, friends) as players rather than individuals, it celebrates the warmth of human relationships. Mostly, though, the show has generally abandoned the vaguely educational impulses of game shows both past and present to emphasize another kind of ethic: the morality of wealth. The show assures its viewers that its contestants, very often war veterans and community leaders and otherwise “good people,” as Hardwick commonly refers to them, will be deserving of such riches. It offers “life-changing money,” Hardwick commonly refers to it, to those who deserve to have their lives changed. The Wall is a structure of chance; NBC has structured the game that revolves around it, however, to ensure that only “good people” will be allowed to get lucky.

The show works, roughly, like this: A couple, pre-vetted, is allotted a selection of large, plasticine balls. The pair is divided; one member—the one who remains onstage, with the affable Hardwick—chooses the slots from which each ball is released, from slot 1 on the left to 7 on the right. Each glowing orb seems to be sucked up, pneumatically, from the stage to the top of the wall; it is dropped, with a slight whooshing noise, from there. It pings around on the board as it falls, physics-ing frantically, until it settles, finally, into the slot that will help to determine the amount of “life-changing money” the playing couple is granted. The slots can be worth anything from $1 to, in the later rounds of the game, $1 million.

The ball-dropping process is repeated, many times over—with the drops adding money (at which point the wall turns green) or taking it away (at which point the wall turns red). The monetary values, plus and minus, increase as the game progresses; the point is to coax The Wall into giving more money than it takes away—something achieved, for the most part, through the secluded partner’s ability to correctly answer the show’s multiple-choice trivia questions. Correct answers mean that money is added, incorrect mean that it is subtracted. Oh, and! The member of the couple who does battle with The Wall has to bet, each time around, on whether the isolated partner will be able to answer the questions correctly, and … yes.

“I was literally less nervous invading Fallujah,” Jarrod, a former Marine, told Hardwick of his time at The Wall.

If all that sounds extremely complicated, it definitely is. But also, in practice: It definitely isn’t. There’s, sure, some de Moivre–Laplace theorem stuff happening with the physics of the ball movements, and there’s, totally, some prisoner’s dilemma business going on with the separated-but-cooperating couple, and there are, to be sure, approximately 23 different rules that Hardwick cheerfully reiterates, to players and viewers, each episode. All you really need to know, though—all anyone really needs to know, in the end—is that the ball drops, and it bounces, and it bounces again, and (aaaahhhh) it looks like it’s heading toward the $1 million slot, but then (aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!) it looks like it’ll land in the $1 slot, but then bounce and then bounce and then zig and then zag and the whole thing is so simple and so dramatic and so thoroughly, thoroughly riveting.

It is also, time after time, extremely tense. As Jarrod Guzman, a former Marine, told Hardwick of his time doing battle with The Wall, “I was literally less nervous invading Fallujah.”

#Winning. (Ben Cohen / NBC)

You could dismiss The Wall as derivative of many things that came before it: It’s Plinko, yes, but it’s also Pachinko meets a bean machine meets a comically large Lite-Brite board, with elements of trivia (Jeopardy!, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, etc.) and cooperation (Family Feud) and chance (Wheel of Fortune) thrown in for good measure. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a contract-negotiation element (Deal or No Deal?), too? Well, there’s a contract-negotiation element, too.

But another way of seeing The Wall is as a kind of towering culmination. Not just of the hulking, flashing structure for which it’s named—and not just of all those earlier American game shows, with their heady mix of intellectual attainment and good, old-fashioned fate—but also of this particular, and peculiar, moment in American history. “The Wall is the most American game show on TV,” Vulture’s Jen Chaney put it, astutely and correctly. And it is that both broadly and very specifically. NBC’s massive, money-mongering wall suggests, on the one hand, the teeming sense of omni-possibility that has accompanied a tech revolution and a century’s worth of swaggering American hegemony.

The balls bounce and bounce and zig and zag and the whole thing is so simple and so dramatic and so thoroughly, thoroughly riveting.

But The Wall also suggests, in its “these are deserving people” approach to its mind-boggling financial rewards, a certain fatigue—about politics, about voracious consumerism, about power itself. Each bounce of each ball is regulated not just by friction and collision and gravity, but also by a very precise kind of spin on the Protestant ethic: Riches, in the show’s framing, aren’t the reflections of one’s moral goodness so much as they are its well-deserved rewards. The Wall, like most game shows, uses money as a prize. Here, though, unlike other game shows, it is an end in itself. Contestants talk, in detail, about what they will do with the money they might win: pay off student loans, buy dream homes, start families. Hardwick talks about his own desire for them to walk away with “money for your family, for your future.”

Shantell Guzman, the wife of Jarrod, returned to the stage after being confined from her husband so he could tell her how much money the couple had coaxed from The Wall. “When I was back there,” she told him, tearfully, “I dreamed big. I dreamed of helping our parents. And I dreamed of the house I grew up in that my parents had to get rid of that is just magically back on the market now—and how awesome that would be to just pay it, cash.”  

Shantell could be blunt because she trusted that Hardwick, and the audience along with him, was on her side. She trusted in the game itself—and in its producers’ desire to reward her, and her husband, and their four children, for their sacrifices. She trusted in The Wall’s highly structured approach to fate: its suggestion of a world that is ordered just enough to be fair, but disordered just enough to be interesting.

#Notlosing! (Ben Cohen / NBC)

In that sense, The Wall is reminiscent of some of its fellow reality shows—Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, for example, which was careful to select deserving families for its house-improvement efforts, or Undercover Boss, which often finds the bosses in question bestowing surprise bonuses on their employees, for good deeds gone previously unrewarded.

The Wall is less reminiscent, however, of its fellow primetime game shows. It is one of many series that are together creating a kind of game-show renaissance on American network television—many of them resurrections of that ’70s-style brand of show, so flashy and wacky and studded, sometimes, with “a constellation of stars.” ABC’s Celebrity Family Feud, hosted by Steve Harvey, is a celebrity-inflected remake of Mark Goodson’s 1976 series. Match Game, its set coyly referencing its own mid-century-tastic predecessors, is hosted by Alec Baldwin, and features cameos from stars like Ellie Kemper, Wayne Brady, and Rosie O’Donnell. Those shows, along with the Michael Strahan-hosted $100,000 Pyramid and the Anthony Anderson-hosted To Tell the Truth, make up ABC’s Sunday-evening lineup. The network has nicknamed the block its “Fun and Games” night.

The Wall’s world is ordered just enough to be fair, but disordered just enough to be interesting.

The primetime game shows, unlike Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune and the many other series that play throughout the day on channels like the Game Show Network—and unlike the daytime game shows that preceded them, decades ago—are generally aiming for broad, cross-demographic audiences. And they seem to be finding them. ABC recently renewed all four of its primetime game shows. And NBC recently ordered 20 more episodes of The Wall. Over its first six telecasts, an NBC representative told me, the show has ranked first or second in its time slot among the big four networks in the 18-49 demographic. It has, like its fellow game shows, proven popular.

There are production-side reasons for game shows’ renaissance, to be sure: their reusable sets, their straightforward scripts and structures, the fact that they star, for the most part, regular people rather than actors, all of that making them less expensive to produce than scripted sitcoms and dramas. But the shows have a consumer-side appeal, as well. They may not have story arcs and narratives, in the manner of scripted shows; what they offer, however, is a kind of feel-good escapism. Game shows are only very subtly political. They are certainly not partisan. They are low-stakes, high-reward, and, in all that, inviting.

The Wall is all of those things. But it is also morally soothing. It offers up protagonists you can feel good about rooting for. It gives those “good people” the chance to win that “life-changing money.” But: only the chance. Will Jarrod and Shantell win the money that will help them to raise their children in their dream home? Will Chris and Katie win an amount that will help them to start their own family? Will Darnell, a “life-saving bus-driver,” and his brother Dion face The Wall, and walk away millionaires? They all deserve such good fortune, the show suggests; whether they will get it, however, will depend on them, and their producers, and, ultimately, a collection of balls that glow and bounce and tease and torment and, every so often, change lives.

Are Deep-State Leakers Defending Democracy or Corroding It?

To paraphrase presidential candidate Donald Trump, somebody’s doing the leaking. But who, and why, and does it represent a defense of American democratic norms or a death knell for them?

There’s no shortage of theories. Some of the damaging leaks are emerging from the White House, as part of internecine warfare between rival factions. But the more consequential ones, including the revelations that forced the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn Monday night, have hinged on information from the intelligence community.

Trump has tried to change the focus away from the substance of the leaks and to their provenance. On Tuesday, he tweeted this:

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

He then followed that up Wednesday morning:

Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?).Just like Russia

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

Thank you to Eli Lake of The Bloomberg View - "The NSA & FBI...should not interfere in our politics...and is" Very serious situation for USA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by "intelligence" like candy. Very un-American!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

Trump may want to change the subject, and his imprecations about the danger of leaks look a lot like the tears of a crocodile, but that doesn’t mean the questions he raises aren’t important.

The president referred to a column by Eli Lake in Bloomberg View, calling Flynn’s ouster a “political assassination.” Lake rejects the White House spin that Flynn was fired simply because of a breach of trust with Trump. Instead, he blames Democratic politicians and, more importantly, the intelligence community:

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

But there are other theories, some of which overlap. At the Washington Free Beacon, a site that is conservative but has generally been anti-Trump, Adam Kredo reports on what he says is “a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump's national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran,” including Ben Rhodes, a former top aide to Barack Obama.

Rhodes rejected the Free Beacon story. “It’s totally absurd and doesn’t make any sense,” he wrote in an email. “I don’t know who the sources are for these stories and I don’t even understand the false conspiracy theory—how would getting rid of Flynn be the thing that saves the Iran Deal? It’s an effort to make the conversation about anything other than the actual story of what happened with Russia.”

Even if there’s no grand conspiracy, there are any number of potential individual culprits. There have also been a stream of stories about frustration, demoralization, and fear within the federal workforce.

Central to the Flynn story is Sally Yates, a career prosecutor who became a high-ranking Justice Department official in the Obama administration. She became acting attorney general after Trump’s inauguration. Yates informed the White House counsel in late January that Flynn was not telling the truth when he claimed he had not discussed sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador, and that the Justice Department was concerned that he was vulnerable to blackmail. A few days later, Yates said Justice would not defend Trump’s executive order on immigration, and she was fired. That means Yates loyalists might have an incentive to leak damaging information.

And Trump has waged a months-long campaign against the intelligence community. During the campaign, he repeatedly rejected the consensus assessment that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in order to interfere with the election, only in January saying he accepted that conclusion. The day after his inauguration, Trump went to the CIA, where he sought to bury the hatchet. “I am so behind you,” Trump said. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump.” In his tweets Wednesday, he notably did not mention the CIA, but his feud with the intelligence community is apparently back in action.

As a general rule, it’s probably unwise to pick a fight with spies, a point Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made in early January. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he said. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Yet Schumer’s warning, even if realistic, is chilling: Not only does it raise the possibility of unelected, faceless bureaucrats using classified information to retaliate against a duly elected president, but that comes in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the Obama years. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed the vast powers that the NSA had accrued and could use, even on American citizens, with little or no oversight.

Some commentators have dubbed what’s going on the revenge of the American Deep State, in reference to the existence—real, imagined, or a little bit in between—of a bureaucratic shadow government that constrains the legitimate government in places like Turkey. In Turkey, generals devoted to the secularist ideology of national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk have repeatedly toppled governments that they worried were threatening that ideology. In January, when a dossier of explosive and unverified claims about Trump was published, Glenn Greenwald, the leftist journalist who helped break the Snowden story, warned that liberals who cheered the dossier were in effect cheering for an intelligence coup. Greenwald specifically labeled these actions the work of a Deep State, writing, “But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind.”

The idea of a “Deep State” constraining Trump was not new. Back in February, when the idea of a President Trump still seemed wildly implausible, Megan McArdle wrote that he wouldn’t be able to do that much damage even if he won, thanks to bureaucrats who could slow-walk or even block his priorities. “This is the reality: Most of what you want to do to Washington won’t get done—and neither will much of what you want to get done outside of it, if you insist on taking Washington on,” she wrote. After the inauguration, some liberals took new heart in that idea.

But the Deep State motif has really gained in popularity over the last few days, as the pace of leaks undermining Trump has accelerated. “The fact the nation’s now-departed senior guardian of national security was unmoored by a scandal linked to a conversation picked up on a wire offers a rare insight into how exactly America’s vaunted Deep State works,” Marc Ambinder writes at Foreign Policy. “It is a story not about rogue intelligence agencies running amok outside the law, but rather about the vast domestic power they have managed to acquire within it.”

It’s not just the leaks. At Slate, Phillip Carter argued that pushback from career officials had helped prevent Trump from instituting a plan to reinstate torture, labeling this the work of a deep state.

Not everyone buys the analogy.

“I wouldn’t call what is going on in the United States a Deep State,” said Omer Taspinar, a professor at the National War College and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution who is an expert on both national security and Turkey.

The Turkish Deep State is something different, Taspinar contends—a clandestine network of retired intelligence officials, mafiosi, and others who engage in prosecutable criminal activity. He offered a hypothetical scenario that would echo the sorts of tactics the Turkish Deep State deployed in the war against Kurdish separatists: Imagine if white nationalists with ties to the administration conducted false-flag attacks intended to gin up concerns about Islamist terror and enable Trump’s tough immigration controls.

“It was not the judiciary, the civil society, the media, or the bureaucrats trying to engage in checks and balances against a legitimately elected government,” he said. “What we’re witnessing in the U.S., it’s basically the institutional channels.”

Even leaking, which sometimes does flirt with violating the law, doesn’t deserve to be tarred as the work of a nefarious deep state, Taspinar said.

“Anything that would try to portray what the leakers, or what the government officials try to do as a ‘Deep State’ is an attempt to delegitimize whistleblowers or people who believe that what the government is doing right [now] is against the Constitution,” he said. “Any kind of bureaucratic resistance is too innocuous to be labeled as the activities of the Deep State.”

Perhaps there needs to be a better term for the resistance that bureaucrats offer to presidents they oppose. (After all, some experts contend they also hobbled Obama on some issues.) But one common element, from whistleblowers to bureaucratic leakers to violent Deep State thugs in Turkey, is a commitment to certain norms and practices, and the sense that the only way to defend norms is to violate them on a case-by-case basis.

And as the Turkish example shows, that works—up to a point. The problem is that when a deep state pushes too far, it can undermine itself and end up empowering that which it seeks to prevent. The Turkish military repeatedly toppled governments, starting in 1960. But more recently, its power has waned. Current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used allegations of Deep State plotting against the government as a pretext for mass arrests of dissidents, detention of journalists, and further crackdowns on civil society. In July, some elements of the Turkish military attempted a coup, but were too weak to succeed. Even Turkish liberals who disliked Erdogan condemned the coup. The Deep State now seems too weak to work real change, but the threat is strong enough to allow Erdogan to discredit legitimate opposition.

There’s a great gulf between the Turkish situation and the Trump administration—though some analysts have not hesitated to draw parallels between the two men’s styles. Trump’s American opponents, like their Turkish counterparts, face the challenge of fostering leaks and bureaucratic resistance that can hem in the Trump administration and reveal any wrongdoing. If they go too far, however, they risk catastrophe in two directions: They might empower an unaccountable intelligence agency, with dangerous long-term effects; or they might inspire such a backlash from Trump and his allies in Congress that he works to dismantle the bureaucratic system, removing an essential constraint on the president’s power. The question isn’t what the good choice and bad choice are; it’s what the least worst choice is.