John Cassidy's Blog, page 17

Could Obamacare Save the Democrats?

You Know Who was back on Twitter Thursday morning, and for the second day running he addressed the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act—a venture that is already threatening to turn into a political disaster for the G.O.P., and a much-needed lifeline for the Democrats.

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Published on January 05, 2017 15:32

Donald Trump’s Alarmingly Trumpian Transition

With the House Republicans reversing themselves (temporarily, perhaps) on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics, and Megyn Kelly jumping from Fox News to NBC News, the 2017 political-news cycle began with a bang on Tuesday. But there was no getting away from the story that overwhelms all others: in sixteen days, Donald Trump will become the forty-fifth President of the United States. Outside the Trump family and the alt-right, is there anyone who didn’t shudder a little as the ball dropped in Times Square on Saturday night?

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Published on January 04, 2017 12:01

Ayn Rand and Corporate Tax Cuts Won’t Mend the Economy

In a post on LinkedIn the other day, Ray Dalio, one of the world’s richest and most successful hedge-fund managers, offered some thoughts on the incoming Trump Administration. If “you haven’t read Ayn Rand lately, I suggest that you do as her books pretty well capture the mindset,” Dalio, the founder and chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, wrote. “This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers. It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with significant power.”

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Published on December 22, 2016 10:28

The Road from Saddam Hussein to Donald Trump

As the members of the Electoral College gathered across the country on Monday, to elect the next President, there was another rash of articles seeking to explain how an untested candidate, whose approval rating stood at 37.5 per cent on November 8th, had managed to defeat an opponent who was a former First Lady, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. But the piece that caught my eye wasn’t directly tied to the election. It was a gripping review in the Times of a new book by John Nixon, a former C.I.A. officer, who was the first agency official to interview Saddam Hussein after American forces captured him hiding in a hole in the ground near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, in December, 2003.

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Published on December 20, 2016 10:04

Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump

Over the past few weeks, a number of anguished friends and acquaintances, and even some strangers, have got in touch with me to ask what they might do to oppose Donald Trump. Being a fellow sufferer from OATS—Obsessing About Trump Syndrome—my first instinct has been to tell people to get off social media and take a long walk. It won’t do anybody much good, except possibly Trump, if large numbers of people who voted against him send themselves mad by constantly reading about him, cursing him, and recirculating his latest outrages.

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Published on December 16, 2016 08:22

Trump’s Brazen Dodge to Avoid Dealing with His Conflicts of Interest

The big Donald Trump news of the past twenty-four hours isn’t the fact that he’s nominating Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, to be Secretary of State. We’ve known for a few days that was coming, just as we knew that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was the favorite to be Trump’s choice as Energy Secretary. (This despite the fact that, in 2012, when Perry ran for President, he wanted to abolish the department.) And, no, I’m also not referring to Kanye West’s visit to Trump Tower, which sent social media into a frenzy.

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Published on December 13, 2016 14:50

Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack

For any would-be authoritarian strongman, a lesson of history is that you can’t do it by yourself. To accumulate power and vanquish your opponents, you need powerful elements of the state—such as the police, the armed forces, senior politicians, and the judiciary—to go along with your designs, or at least to stand aside as you do as you will. In some cases, such as Weimar Germany and Vittorio Emmanuel III’s Italy, many people in positions of influence were willing to support an authoritarian upstart because their commitment to democracy was weak or nonexistent to begin with. In other cases, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, elected leaders exploited threats of terrorism and domestic chaos to justify the curtailment of political rights and the harassment of political opponents.

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Published on December 12, 2016 15:00

The Political Bargain Behind Trump’s Cabinet of Lamentables

Of all the images transmitted from the lobby of Trump Tower over the past few weeks, perhaps the most poignant were the ones of a white-haired Al Gore emerging from the elevators after a face-to-face with the building’s owner, on Monday. “I found it an extremely interesting meeting, and to be continued,” Gore told the ever-present cameras. “I’m just going to leave it at that.” Some people interpreted the fact that Donald Trump had met with Gore, the former Democratic Vice-President and veteran climate-change campaigner, as a sign that he might be rethinking the retrogressive views about environmental policy he expressed during the campaign. This line of thinking appeared to get another boost on Wednesday, when Leonardo DiCaprio, who earlier this year released a documentary about the impact of global warming called “Before the Flood,” also traipsed into Trump Tower.

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Published on December 09, 2016 14:06

How Much of the Obama Doctrine Will Survive Trump?

On Tuesday, President Obama delivered what was billed as his last big foreign-policy address before his term ends. Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, the headquarters of Central Command and Special Operations Command, Obama called for the United States to adhere to the law and to abstain from using torture, imposing religious tests, stigmatizing Muslims, and other illiberal acts that Donald Trump has, at times, advocated. “These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon,” Obama declared.

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Published on December 08, 2016 11:55

What Europe Needs: Hope

On the eve of the weekend’s referendum in Italy and Presidential election in Austria, The Economist’s Bagehot column warned against interpreting everything that happens around the world in terms of Donald Trump’s triumph on November 8th. “Barely a day goes by without politics somewhere being related to the president elect’s shock victory” and the rise of right-wing populism, the pseudonymous columnist wrote.

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Published on December 06, 2016 15:35