John Cassidy's Blog, page 15

An Encouraging First Victory Over Trumpery

Thursday’s ruling from three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a freeze on the Trump Administration’s anti-Muslim travel ban, was obviously a significant legal setback for the White House. My colleague Amy Davidson explained how the judges dismissed practically every argument that the Justice Department had presented to them. The ruling’s biggest repercussion for Trump, however, might be a political one. On just his twenty-first day in office, three very senior federal judges, one of them a Republican appointee, issued a stunning smackdown of his divisive and dangerous approach to governing.

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Football and Politics
The Vulnerabilities in the Ninth Circuit’s Executive-Order Decision
Kellyanne Conway’s Battle for Trump’s Favor

Why Does Donald Trump Lash Out at Everybody, Even Judges?

One of the problems with writing about Donald Trump is that you can never be quite sure what you are dealing with. Some days, he comes across as a dangerous authoritarian intent on installing himself as America’s Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Other days, he comes across like Frank Costanza—George’s father on “Seinfeld”—a crotchety old guy from Queens railing at the world.

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Copy-Editing Trump: The Black History Month Speech
When Presidents Think About Defying the Courts
Canadian Scientists Know What to Expect from Trump

Britain Jumps Into a Brexit Wonderland

With all the craziness going on in Washington these days, it’s easy to ignore what’s happening in the outside world. But Trump-style populism and nationalism is a transatlantic threat, and we should keep an eye on how it is progressing in other countries.

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Theresa May’s American Adventure
Burns Night in the Age of Brexit and Trump
Watching President Trump with Horror Around the World

Paul Ryan’s Craven Pact with Donald Trump

On Tuesday morning, at about the time that Donald Trump was casually threatening to destroy the career of a Texas state senator who had objected to laws regarding the forfeiture of property from drug suspects, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues in the House Republican leadership held their weekly press conference on Capitol Hill.

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The Betsy DeVos Confirmation Debacle
A New Live Series on the Trump Administration
A Temporary Reprieve for Some Iraqi Refugees

Donald Trump Is the “TV Reality” President

President Trump was up early on Monday morning, and, as usual, he was watching MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” How do we know this? Between six and seven A.M., Joe Scarborough, the show’s co-host, discussed the reports that Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, is the one directing policy in the White House. Scarborough showed the cover of this week’s Time magazine, which features Bannon along with the headline “The Great Manipulator.” Scarborough also showed a clip from “Saturday Night Live,” in which Bannon, presented as a skeleton in a black cloak, instructed Trump in the Oval Office before taking over his desk and consigning him to a smaller one. “I don’t know. Maybe Bannon is calling all the shots,” Scarborough said. “I still don’t think he is.”

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Related:
The Loving, Warlike Unity of Gay Americans Against Trump
What Trump Wants Bill O’Reilly, and All of Us, to Forget
Daily Cartoon: Monday, February 6th

From “Drain the Swamp” to Government Sachs

Until now, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, has been the invisible member of the Trump Administration. Now we know why: he has been busy preparing favors for his old pals on Wall Street. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Cohn said that Trump was preparing to sign an executive order designed to pave the way for a broad rollback of the regulatory regime that the Obama Administration and Congress introduced after the disastrous financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

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The Bodega Strike Against Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration
How to Stay Sane as a Cartoonist in Trumpland
For the Protesters at Standing Rock, It’s Back to Pipeline Purgatory

Have the Democrats Got the Right Supreme Court Strategy?

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, has his critics, but he is seldom accused of not knowing which way the wind is blowing. After making some early noises about coöperating with Donald Trump, and then voting for some of the new President’s Cabinet nominees, the sixty-six-year-old Democrat encountered a barrage of criticism from his Party’s supporters. On Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators marched near his Brooklyn home and chanted, “Chuck! Chuck! Don’t sell us out! We need a fighter to knock Trump out!”

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Cover Story: John W. Tomac’s “Liberty’s Flameout”
World Leaders Receive Crank Calls from Someone Claiming to Be President of United States
Chicago’s Violence and Trump’s Ominous Tweets

Why Corporate America Must Stand Up to Trump

Over the weekend, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, the venerable manufacturing conglomerate that dates back to 1892—and Thomas Edison—issued a statement to G.E.’s employees distancing the company from Donald Trump’s travel bans on people from predominantly Muslim nations. “We have many employees from the named countries and we do business all over the region,” Immelt pointed out. He said the firm would “stand with” its employees and customers in the countries affected by Trump’s discriminatory policy.

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The Many Dangers of Donald Trump’s Executive Order
Poetry in a Time of Protest
“Becoming Warren Buffett,” the Man, Not the Investor

A Welcome Setback for Donald Trump

“Americans severely misjudged the authoritarians,” Umair Haque, a consultant and social-media maven, commented on Twitter on Saturday night. “But the authoritarians, it seems, also severely misjudged Americans.” Yes, they did, and this weekend’s events offered a bit of hope to everybody alarmed by Donald Trump. Saving America from the most unhinged and least qualified figure ever to occupy the Oval Office may well require a long and bitter fight. But a couple of early markers have been put down. The new President is not beyond the law. And many Americans will not stand by quietly as he traduces their country’s values, threatens its democracy, and destroys its reputation around the world.

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Speechless: The Trump Effect
A Sharp Intake of Breath at “Fiddler on the Roof”
Waking Up and No Longer Feeling Part of America

Steve Bannon’s War on the Press

Somewhere in the West Wing of the White House, I’m guessing, Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief political strategist, is chuckling to himself. A quick call with a Times reporter, and, a day later, there was his mug on the paper’s front page, next to a story in which he was quoted as saying, “The paper of record for our beloved Republic, the New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated. They got it 100 per cent wrong.” Talk about hitting the enemy where it lives.

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The Kind of Comedy That Can Hurt Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 27th
Trump Tweets the Classics