Tipping the Scales
Noah Feldman
July 19, 2018 Issue
If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal. Kennedy’s successor will be Trump’s second Surpreme Court pick and may not be his last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-five, clearly wishes to stay on the Court as long as Trump is president. So does Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns eighty later this year. But neither is immortal. Especially if Trump is reelected, he could potentially replace both of these justices with staunch young conservatives.
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The ‘Witch Hunters’
Tim Weiner
August 16, 2018 Issue
The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies
by Michael V. Hayden
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
by James Comey
Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence
by James R. Clapper, with Trey Brown
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Robert Mueller, James Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Flynn, and Philip Goldberg at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Washington, D.C., March 2013
1.
To Donald Trump it seems as though the “Deep State” has arisen from the depths of the dismal swamp of Washington to torment him. He sees a cabal of his political enemies—foremost the men who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as a cryptocracy operating under the cover of the constitutionally established government, an immense conspiracy, a dark force seeking to destroy him. The president awakens to tweet thunderbolts against it before Fox & Friends signs on at dawn. (To wit: May 23, 2018, 6:54 AM: “the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam….”)
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Singapore Sham
Jessica T. Mathews
August 16, 2018 Issue
There are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore.
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Hail to the Chief
Michael Tomasky
August 16, 2018 Issue
Win McNamee/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump delivering the State of the Union address, Washington, D.C., January 2018
Soon, according to a June report in The Washington Post, the moment of truth will arrive. Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the president, his administration, and his campaign, will deliver his verdict on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice.
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Trump’s Chaver in Jerusalem
Jonathan Freedland
August 16, 2018 Issue
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer
Perhaps it’s now impossible to read any political biography without thinking of Donald Trump. The forty-fifth president of the United States looms so large in the global imagination that the impulse to measure all other politicians against him has become almost involuntary. But in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, the grounds for comparison are stronger than most.
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