Our dark times: Jeffrey Goldfarb on setting the intellectual and political context for the investigation of media, the new authoritarianism and its alternatives. Trump’s Russian laundromat: How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House. What did Republicans know about the Russia scandal? America deserves an answer. Top Democrat on Senate Intelligence Committee fears Trump will pardon anyone who colluded. How do we contend with Trump’s defiance of “norms”? How to know who will let Trump get away with anything. Masha Gessen on waking up to the Trumpian world.
Republicans have changed in the age of Trump: What was already a strong strain of anti-intellectualism has become completely dominant — what this means for the future is grim. The closing of the Republican mind: For President Trump’s supporters, an open society is not the goal. We are not, after all, divided because Americans pulled back from the center and retreated into extremism; no, we are divided because one party did — and it wasn’t the Democrats. Jeffrey D. Sachs on how our current political travails can be traced to Reagan.
Trump’s trolls are waging war on America’s civil servants. Trolls are now running the government, led by Donald Trump and Republicans like Steve King. Republicans reluctantly acknowledge a failure of governing. Thread: “A meta-thought on the state of play: our government is now clearly in a kakistocracy (rule by the worst) death spiral”. Most Americans think Washington is corrupt, but they have no idea what real kleptocracy actually looks like; even if Trump-Russia collusion amounted to nothing more than #fakenews, this is a hell of a lot of damage that Trump’s enablers in the right-wing media and in Congress are inflicting upon the United States. We’re really going to need to make America great again once Trump is finished.
