Roger Stone, a former advisor to President Donald Trump, exits the Federal Courthouse on Jan. 25, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The government was shut down, but Robert Mueller kept working.
That became clear early Friday morning, when FBI agents arrested Roger Stone at his Florida home in connection with Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. Stone later appeared in federal court to face charges that include witness tampering and making false statements to Congress.
Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump and a frenetic character with a reputation as a Republican dirty trickster who has been one of the most colorful figures in the Trump-Russia story, has finally been brought to heel. With this latest indictment, the special counsel is drawing ever closer to Trump’s inner circle.
The indictment sheds new light on the alleged efforts by Stone and others around Trump to glean information about the trove of Democratic emails obtained by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. It also raises new questions about whether Stone sought to influence and direct WikiLeaks releases that were damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Since his name first surfaced in connection with the Trump-Russia inquiry, Stone has behaved in public like a clown, reveling in his cheap celebrity while also taunting Mueller and the press. He acted in the same manner after his court appearance on Friday, meeting the crowd outside the Florida courthouse with both arms raised in a Nixon-like victory salute while vowing not to testify falsely against Trump to save himself, and predicting his ultimate vindication.
But the indictment shows that Stone has some serious legal problems, and that his role as a possible link between the Trump circle and the cyber-assault on the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign can’t be laughed off or easily dismissed.
The indictment alleges that Stone engaged in a concerted effort to find out what documents WikiLeaks had obtained that could harm Clinton’s campaign, and what WikiLeaks (identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1”) was going to do with them. He was scrambling to find out in advance when the documents would be released and tried to get messages to WikiLeaks to look for specific documents in their trove that he thought would be most harmful to Clinton, according to the indictment.
The indictment says that in June and July 2016, Stone told Trump campaign officials that he had information that WikiLeaks had documents that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign. The indictment notes that Stone did so after the Democratic National Committee had already made public the fact that it had been hacked by the Russian government, strongly implying that Stone should have known that the material obtained by WikiLeaks had come from the Russians. (The United States intelligence community has now concluded that Russian intelligence hacked the Democrats and turned over a massive archive of emails to WikiLeaks, which later released them.)
The Trump campaign evidently began to realize that Stone knew what he was talking about when WikiLeaks released some documents on July 22, 2016. It was then, according to the indictment, that the Trump campaign began to try to use Stone’s apparent inside knowledge as a weapon.
After that, a senior Trump campaign official was “directed to contact Stone” to determine what he knew about further document releases and what WikiLeaks had about the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment, which does not identify the senior Trump campaign official or say who ordered the official to contact Stone.
Subsequently, Stone told Trump campaign officials about upcoming WikiLeaks releases, according to the indictment. Stone used intermediaries to communicate with WikiLeaks, including in his efforts to influence the release of specific information that he believed would be particularly damaging to the Clinton campaign.
In September 2016, Stone asked an intermediary to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (identified in the indictment as “the head of Organization 1”) to get him to find emails from August 2011 that would help prove specific allegations raised in the press against Clinton about her time as Secretary of State, according to the indictment. The indictment says that on September 18, 2016, Stone sent an email to “Person 2” (widely identified in the press Friday as New York comedian Randy Credico), who Stone was then using as a go-between with Assange. The email included an article that contained allegations against Clinton related to her time as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. The indictment does not say what those allegations were. “Please ask [Assange] for any State or HRC email from August 10 to August 30 – particularly on August 20, 2011, that mention [the subject of the article] or confirm this narrative.”
If the indictment is borne out, Stone’s actions come very close to making him the key missing link in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. He allegedly worked hard to acquire advance knowledge of Wikileaks document releases and, at the Trump campaign’s request, gave that information to Trump campaign officials. He seemingly tried to direct WikiLeaks to release certain documents in order to increase the damage to Clinton. And he did it all at a time when he should have realized that the Russians were behind the Democratic hack.
Still, the indictment does not charge Stone with a crime for his efforts to act as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. Instead, he is charged in connection with his efforts to cover up his role in the face of congressional inquiries that began after the election, and more broadly, to block investigators from answering underlying questions about Russian intervention in the 2016 election. “After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened or announced their respective investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which included investigating STONE’s claims of contact with [Wikileaks],” the indictment states. “In response, STONE took steps to obstruct these investigations.”
The indictment shows that Stone used mob-like tactics to try to stop Credico from honestly telling Congress what he knew. In December 2017, Stone told Credico that he should be like “Frank Pentangeli” in his congressional testimony, the indictment says. Pentangeli was a fictional character in “The Godfather Part II,” who told Congress that he didn’t know information that he actually did know. In April 2018, Stone sent Credico an angry email. “You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth.” Stone also threatened Credico’s dog. In May, Credico wrote an email back to Stone saying, “you’ve opened yourself up to perjury charges like an idiot.”
While the charges against Stone don’t deal with the underlying question of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Stone indictment still brings Mueller’s probe closer than ever before to the heart of the matter.
The post Roger Stone Made His Name as a Dirty Trickster, But the Trump-Russia Coverup May Finally Bring Him Down appeared first on The Intercept.
Um escândalo dramático, multi-nível e cada vez mais sombrio está engolindo a presidência de Jair Bolsonaro no último mês.
Nesta semana, em Davos, onde o Brasil planejava revelar sua nova face para o capital estrangeiro, Bolsonaro e seus principais ministros deixaram uma conferência de imprensa vazia para evitar responder a perguntas sobre o que seria seu novo governo, em vez de aproveitar a oportunidade para apresentar políticas favoráveis aos investidores.
Bolsonaro cancela entrevista em Davos e culpa comportamento da imprensa —-> https://t.co/J7zf6Kme8P
#folha #Bolsonaro pic.twitter.com/27E48r2OZF
— Folha de S.Paulo (@folha) January 23, 2019
Um governo que começou com um escândalo de corrupção, envolvendo membros da família Bolsonaro em um esquema aparente de ‘rachadinha’ e de lavagem de dinheiro, agora se vê às voltas com milícias, assassinatos e violência, e levou o único membro LGBT do Congresso a fugir do país.
Assista o relatório de Glenn Greenwald sobre como esse escândalo evoluiu e o que isso significa:
The post ASSISTA AO VÍDEO: Glenn Greenwald reporta sobre o escândalo dramático e sombrio que está afogando a presidência de Bolsonaro e forçou Jean Wyllys a fugir appeared first on The Intercept.
A new court-mandated redistricting in Virginia has put Democrats in a prime position to retake both chambers of the state legislature in November 2019 elections for the first time since 1995. But there could still be one major obstacle standing in the way of the party enacting a bottled-up progressive agenda: Democratic Senate Minority Leader Dick Saslaw, a 39-year incumbent with a corporate-friendly voting record and close ties to the state’s dominant power company. As long as Saslaw remains the party’s Senate boss, little can get done without his acquiescence. But for the first time since he was elected senator, he’s facing a primary challenge.
Saslaw has stymied progressive efforts to push an anti-corporate agenda in the state, voting against bills that would lead to substantive regulation of the state’s two electric monopolies, and speaking out against campaign finance reform and increased ethics and transparency regulations. Yasmine Taeb, an American-Muslim human rights lawyer who immigrated to the United States from Iran as a child, launched her primary challenge to Saslaw in September — and she’s going after his ties to Dominion Energy, Virginia’s biggest private-industry political donor. The company gives heavily to both Democrats and Republicans, but Saslaw is its top recipient in the General Assembly and one of its biggest advocates in Richmond.
Taeb moved into the 35th District only last year, and her first foray into politics was in 2014, when she made a failed bid for the Virginia House of Delegates. She’s running on a platform that includes a $15 minimum wage, no corporate PAC donations, and “Medicare for All.” But she’s also focused on stemming Dominion’s influence in the state, fighting to stop the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines.
“My opponent has not faced a primary challenger since 1979. As a result, he has become severely misaligned with the values of our district, the most liberal in the Commonwealth,” Taeb told The Intercept. “I want to be a state senator who actually represents our district — one who stands with our working families rather than union busting employers; one who will fight to end Dominion’s control over our legislators rather than serving it; and one who embodies the diversity of our district rather than slowing down racial justice efforts.”
Her opposition to Saslaw comes amid changes to state and local governments around the country. Democrats flipped more than 300 state House and Senate seats and six state legislative chambers last year. Seven states now have Democratic trifectas, meaning that the party controls the governorship and both chambers in the state legislature. Progressives are more likely to be able to pass policies like a higher minimum wage or eliminating cash bail on the state level than in Congress.
“Dominion has become the key signal of a much broader push against the status quo.”“There are increasingly two visions for Democratic politics in Virginia,” said Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a group advocating for stronger regulation of the state’s monopoly utilities and an end to two decades of manipulating legislation in their favor. “There’s the old-school Virginia Way, corporate friendly, pay to play, and then a new wave of legislators — many freshmen from last year, but a number of longtime incumbents as well — who are running on transparency and independence, putting constituent interests above special interests.”
The new lawmakers are not taking Dominion money, Gilmore said. “As the worst paragon of that old system of corporate cronyism, Dominion has become the key signal of a much broader push against the status quo. And no one represents the old school — or has done Dominion’s bidding — as much as Dick Saslaw.”
Virginia Democrats are angling to win control of the state legislature in 2019, and Saslaw’s re-election would make him the likely majority leader. A Democratic majority would make passing progressive legislation possible, but activists in the state worry that Saslaw, who has argued against proposals to strengthen campaign finance and ethics laws, would get in the way of that. Taeb is hoping that she can mobilize voters in their increasingly progressive district — which Saslaw helped redraw in 2011 — against him by highlighting his cozy, mutually beneficial relationship with Dominion ahead of the June 11 primary election.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Dominion is known for helping to write legislation in its favor. The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2017 ran a four-part series that found Dominion exerting significant influence to gradually gut the power of the State Corporation Commission, the regulatory agency tasked with overseeing the company’s dealings. The assembly last year passed a bill that further weakened the SCC’s ratepayer protections. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has described the relationship between the state legislature and the utility as “cronyism.”
“Dominion Energy is the strongest lobbying entity in Virginia, and that’s very evident in the fact that we’ve, for several years now, had legislation that further hurt ratepayers,” Delegate Sam Rasoul told The Intercept. “Objectively now, even Dominion agrees that it has overcharged ratepayers.”
Saslaw has consistently opposed bills pushing energy and spending efficiency, introducing and supporting Dominion-advised bills to allow the public utility to double-charge consumers and keep the excess profits, freeze electricity rates, and keep the SCC from regularly reviewing those rates. Saslaw is also known, according to a Democratic state legislator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity given his relationship with the senator, for reprimanding individual members of the assembly for trying to amend Dominion-sponsored bills. According to local activist and Fairfax County Democratic Committee Member Stephen Spitz, who is volunteering with Taeb’s campaign, Saslaw is famous for scolding his colleagues for trying to rein in the company and going on unsolicited tangents singing its praises. Dominion, in turn, contacts Saslaw when it’s in trouble.
Saslaw’s campaign has raised just shy of $600,000 this cycle, including $22,500 from the Dominion Employees PAC, formerly known as Dominion Energy PAC. He’s also accepted donations from PACs associated with the weapons manufacturer, Raytheon, and controversial car-title lenders, which he’s been bashed for supporting. Taeb’s campaign, meanwhile, has raised just over $70,000. Fifty-thousand dollars of that came from Sonjia Smith, a longtime area Democratic donor who is married to Michael D. Bills, a billionaire investor who started an initiative to support candidates who refused to take money from Dominion.
The incumbent’s campaign manager, Andrew Whitley, said Saslaw respects candidates who have sworn off Dominion money, but he will continue to take money from the utility. “As the leader of the caucus, his main goal in 2019 is to take back the majority,” Whitley told The Intercept. “And of course, making that happen means that making sure that our campaigns have the resources to be successful. So yes, he does take contributions from Dominion, and he takes them with the goal of making Virginia more progressive and helping us take back the Senate.”
Whitley said that Saslaw’s voting record, and his endorsements by the League of Conservation Voters and advocates for solar, disprove the notion that Dominion’s donations have bought influence. “The senator has voted on initiatives that have been against Dominion’s influence,” Whitley said. He did not specify what initiatives those were.
Virginia is one of only six states that allow unlimited corporate contributions to state campaigns. Republicans Sen. Frank Wagner and Delegate Terry Kilgore are other lawmakers who have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the utility giant while in office. Wagner in 2015 sponsored a controversial rate-freeze bill, which he authored and passed with help from Dominion, that locked in rates for the utility and allowed it to overcharge consumers by estimates of up to $425 million.
Following public outcry over that legislation, Saslaw and Wagner co-sponsored another bill last year that they said was meant to right the wrongs of the rate-freeze bill. Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring publicly denounced that bipartisan, pro-Dominion bill for double-charging clients and installing inadequate consumer protections. The state Senate killed another bill introduced by Democratic Sen. Chap Petersen that would have more abruptly lifted the rate freeze and pursued the Wagner-Saslaw measure, which was more favorable to utilities instead. It was eventually approved and signed into law last March.
This year, Rasoul and Rep. Alfonso H. Lopez are co-sponsoring an omnibus bill that would reinstate biannual reviews of Dominion rates by the SCC and increase the amount of over-earnings the company must refund to consumers. It is unclear whether the bill will have enough support to pass.
“It’ll be difficult for it to pass as it comes through the powerful Commerce and Labor committee,” Rasoul said. But, he said, pledges by Democratic candidates, as well as the attorney general and the lieutenant governor, not to take money from Dominion are a good sign. “The bar has definitely been elevated, that you need to be on the right side of this in order to be a candidate.”
Some Democrats think it’s important to balance skepticism of corporate donations with the risk of losing elections. “If we were not to take money, and Republicans still take money, and Democrats lose, there’s a part of me that would regret seeing that,” said Peg Winningham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee. “But I absolutely think that Virginia should have a lot stricter controls on campaign donations.”
In addition to his ties to Dominion, Saslaw’s critics have also turned their attention to the senator’s past comments that, they say, show he is out of step with an increasingly diverse Democratic Party.
In September, Saslaw was at George Mason University for a senatorial debate between Tim Kaine and Corey Stuart. In a conversation with a group of people at that event, Saslaw suggested that voters in the 38th District would not vote for Taeb given that his district is majority white, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.
Saslaw said Taeb “‘can’t win in a district like this,’ and then he went off spouting all these facts about his district,” said one person who was there, requesting anonymity because of their relationship with the senator. Saslaw pointed out that the district is “60 percent white, it was some percentage of older Virginians, it was some percentage of Christians,” the source said. “Basically the message I interpreted was that someone like Yasmine, who’s a diverse candidate and a young candidate, couldn’t win in the district.”
Yasmine Taeb.
Photo: Courtesy of Yasmine Taeb
Saslaw has previously been accused of being skeptical that a Muslim candidate could win. When Atif Qarni, now Virginia’s secretary of education, was running for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2015, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that state Democrats warned him not to proceed with his campaign because, as a Muslim, he couldn’t win. Responding to a Facebook post criticizing the article, Qarni named Saslaw in relation to the challenges he faced securing funding as a Muslim candidate. “There was bias in this race. Religion was brought up,” Qarni wrote in a comment. “I brought up these concerns with several people–including some people you know well, but the typical response, was ‘this is politics’. People are too afraid to stand up to people like Dick Saslaw.”
In a 2015 meeting of the Mason District Democratic Committee, Saslaw opposed a proposal to change the name of the Jeb Stuart High School, which was named after a Confederate army general. He described the name-change effort as being overly politically correct and suggested that it would lead to a slippery slope, with calls to change the name of Virginia schools and landmarks named after Confederate leaders, according to Spitz; David Jonas, a Mason District Democrat; Sean Barnett, a Fairfax County Democrat; and two local Democrats who asked for anonymity given their working relationship with the senator, who were all at the meeting. (Barnett has endorsed Taeb for state senator.)
Though Saslaw originally opposed changing the name of Stuart High, he appeared this year at a fundraiser supporting the school board’s move. He also donated to the private fundraising efforts to support the change. The school is now called Justice High School.
Jessica Swanson, a Mason District Democrat, told The Intercept that she is extremely grateful for the senator’s $1,500 contribution to the name-change effort. She was at the 2015 meeting and said she doesn’t remember what, if anything, Saslaw said about it at the time.
Three years earlier, Saslaw had cut his sponsorship of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s annual dinner, after members changed the event’s name from the Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner — after the slave-owning presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson — to instead honor Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, according to Spitz and another person familiar with the matter. In 2014, the name of the dinner was changed back to Jefferson-Jackson, and Saslaw resumed his support.
Willingham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee who has worked with Saslaw, said she’s “never heard him say a bigoted word.” She knows Taeb as well and hasn’t endorsed either candidate.
In response to questions about Saslaw’s comments on Taeb and the school’s name change, Whitley said talking about these claims does a disservice to both candidates. “We also do a disservice to the constituents and to the party in general by having this kind of conversation,” he said.
The post A Corporate-Friendly Democrat Has Been Stalling Progress For 40 Years. Now a Primary Challenge Might Take Him Out. appeared first on The Intercept.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau penalized a man $1 this week, for illegally exchanging veterans’ pensions for high-interest “cash advances.” Mark Corbett claimed in sworn statements to the bureau that he had an inability to pay any fine of greater value, and the bureau accepted $1 as payment for making illegal, high-cost loans to former members of the armed forces.
Somehow, two other state regulatory agencies, in Arkansas and South Carolina, assisted in the extraction of a single dollar bill from Corbett.
This is not the first time during the Trump administration that CFPB has taken an inability to pay into account to reduce a fine for violations of consumer protection law. Under the previous acting director, current acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, this type of reduction was so widespread that it came to be known as the “Mulvaney discount.” The American justice system rarely treats impoverished defendants with such mercy.
Mulvaney has since been replaced by a confirmed director, his former aide Kathy Kraninger. The discount, however, has remained.
“It looks like the Trump-appointed political leadership at the CFPB is letting a person who preyed on veterans get away with a slap on the wrist,” said Will Corbett, a litigation counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy group, in a statement.
A slap on the wrist for eight years of scamming veterans might be something like $10,000. This is more like a handshake.
Since 2011, Mark Corbett served as an agent for companies that the CFPB declined to name, calling them the “Doe companies.” That almost certainly indicates a future enforcement action against those companies. But companies do not violate laws; people do. And while Mark Corbett was not required to admit or deny the facts or legal conclusions in the consent order, CFPB’s findings were detailed and substantial.
On websites he operated, Mark Corbett marketed a deal for veterans with retiree or disability pensions. He set them up with offers from the Doe companies to purchase some or all of those future pension payments in exchange for a lump sum. Veterans would then use an online portal to redirect pension payments to a bank account controlled by one of the Doe companies. If veterans only sold part of their pension, the Doe companies would reimburse a portion of the payment every month. This was virtually the only source of the Doe companies’ consumer-side business revenue.
It’s also completely illegal. Under federal law assigning veterans’ pensions to a third party is prohibited. In fact, several veterans complained to Mark Corbett that the transactions were illegal; according to those veterans, he denied it.
These deals effectively operated as loan products, with an up-front payment exchanged for installment payments. For that reason, Mark Corbett was required to inform customers of the interest rate, which he never did, insisting instead in written materials that “this is not a loan. … [Y]ou are selling a product for a set price.”
Moreover, after promising to issue the lump sum payment by a set date, the companies would often miss this deadline, sometimes by up to several months, even as veterans signed away their pension benefits.
In a consent order, CFPB lays out this deception, accusing Mark Corbett of brokering illegal contracts with misleading terms, often without even delivering the promised funds to consumers in a timely fashion. It’s unclear how much money Corbett earned from this activity over an eight-year period, but it’s a virtual certainty that it was more than $1.
And yet, that was the ultimate fine.
“Having an inability to pay based on sworn financial statements provided to the Bureau on November 8, 2018, Respondent must pay a civil money penalty of $1 to the Bureau,” the order reads.
In a darkly hilarious denouement, CFPB left in all the boilerplate language included with larger fines. So the consent order intones that $1 dollar must be paid within 10 days of the effective date, and thereafter distributed to the Civil Penalty Fund to compensate victims of financial crimes. Mark Corbett is prohibited from taking a fat tax deduction for paying out that 100-cent penalty, and “to preserve the deterrent effect of the civil money penalty,” he cannot use this greenback as an offset toward any future federal fines. And if Mark Corbett defaults on this four-quarter obligation, interest will accrue. The CFPB even asks for Mark Corbett’s taxpayer ID number, so that they can track him down if he fails to cough up the 10 dimes he owes. The bureau reserves the right to send Mark Corbett into collections for the dollar, and report the delinquency to credit reporting bureaus.
The $1 order also says nothing about whether veterans who suffered losses would receive restitution, although that could be resolved in a future enforcement with the Doe companies.
In an interview, freshman Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., a new member of the House Financial Services Committee and a consumer protection expert, expressed dismay over the $1 fine for scamming veterans. “We should, on a bipartisan basis, be able to say our military veterans should not be cheated,” Porter said.
Asked about declines in enforcement at the CFPB and other financial regulatory agencies, Porter responded, “After President Trump’s election, there’s no reason to think that those working in consumer financial services decided to begin complying with the law at an unheard-of rate.”
In addition to being out a buck, Mark Corbett is banned from brokering sales of veterans’ benefits ever again.
CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Trump’s CFPB Fines a Man $1 For Swindling Veterans, Orders Him Not to Do It Again appeared first on The Intercept.
That the turmoil of the past five weeks was all for “nothing,” in policy terms, is what I argued in a post earlier today. After all the disruption to individual lives and collective services and well-being, Donald Trump accepted the same deal that had been available as of December 19.
Two readers write in to challenge the “nothing” assessment. First, from a former federal employee:
Your post suggesting that the shutdown accomplished nothing was true substantively; the legislation ending the shutdown could have been passed before it took place.
But it missed the vital political point. Donald Trump became accustomed to Congressional servility over the last two years; and he clearly expected to extort the same attitude going forward, as if the Republican defeat in the 2018 elections never happened….
It was necessary to demonstrate to Trump and his supporters that conditions have changed, and that the governing process is going to be different — including the futility of attacking government itself as a means of achieving political goals. That lesson will be essential for future issues, including appropriations bills and the debt limit.
The shutdown was the price of Trump's tuition; and the federal workers who suffered from it — and whose actions helped to end it — achieved something valuable for the country.
And to similar effect, from another reader:
I disagree [with the “nothing” post].
What it does is show everyone Trump's political weakness.
And yes, in theory, McConnell could have introduced a continuing resolution earlier without Trump's approval, but that would have split the GOP and he would have been blamed for it (just because all Republicans voted for it before doesn't mean all still would if Trump turned against it and the GOP base was strongly behind it).
The 35 days of shutdown followed by Trump surrender (actually, failure) weakened his support among the GOP base and allow other actors in the GOP to potentially be more powerful and McConnell doesn't get the blame. McConnell said something to the effect that some folks have to be kicked by a mule to learn (that standing behind one is dumb) or something to that effect.
Mitch definitely doesn't have Trump's political survival as his top priority. He has his own political survival as his top priority.
All the political actors in the shutdown behaved reasonably how you'd expect a politician with at least half-way decent political skills to act.
Except for Trump.
For the past half-decade, women’s tennis has been a paragon of parity, with one glaring exception. Twelve different women have won at least one grand-slam title since 2014; one of them, Serena Williams, has collected six in that time frame. There, in a nutshell, is the recent history of the sport: a handful of excellent players (Angelique Kerber, Garbiñe Muguruza) and one world-annihilating supernova (Williams) consistently vying for the top prizes.
But Naomi Osaka’s steely 7–6 (2), 5–7, 6–4 defeat of Petra Kvitová in the 2019 Australian Open final on Saturday portends an irreparable break from the status quo. The women’s tour will remain replete with exceptional players, many of whom, like Kvitová, have the talent to contend for grand slams. But Osaka’s victory, her second straight grand-slam title, confirms her status as a bona fide superstar capable of rivaling Williams’s preeminence. (Osaka beat Williams in the final of last year’s U.S. Open, an outcome that was unfortunately overshadowed by the umpire’s very poor decision making and the ensuing controversy over Williams’s behavior.) Women’s tennis is now a two-headed monster with Osaka set to take over the No. 1 ranking, Williams unlikely to fade away, and the rest of a deep field still lurking.
To be clear, this is not to argue that Osaka is destined to surpass Williams’s career accomplishments. Williams is the greatest women’s player of all time and one of the 10 greatest athletes ever. It is unlikely that Osaka will come close to matching Williams’s 23 grand-slam titles, a number second only to Margaret Court’s 24. But Osaka feels like the sort of superstar with requisite chops and magnetism to one day supplant Williams as the face of women’s tennis. This makes her different from every other multiple grand-slam winner—Kvitová, Kerber, Muguruza—of the recent past. She’s a mere 21 years of age and the only female player other than Williams to win back-to-back grand-slam titles during the past five years. The stage is set for her reign to begin.
Japan's Naomi Osaka (left) and the Czech Republic's Petra Kvitová pose with their trophies. (Adnan Abidi / Reuters)From a personality standpoint, Osaka isn’t as demonstratively charismatic as Williams, whose warm-as-sunshine smile and proclivity for raffish behavior (recall her lovely, impromptu Crip Walk on the grounds of Wimbledon’s Centre Court) have always commanded the limelight. But the overwhelming physicality of Osaka’s game demands mass attention. Her game and personality are somewhat reminiscent of Rafael Nadal, the great men’s champion who’s never had as polished or charming a public persona as his great rival, Roger Federer, but whose sheer athleticism has always been too exceptional to ignore. Like Nadal’s, Osaka’s ground strokes are so formidable—she is one of the few women on the Women’s Tennis Association tour to consistently hit her forehand at more than 100 miles per hour—that once you sit down to watch her play, you can’t take your eyes off her and can’t help but wonder how this person plays the game with an aggression that verges on unhinged but never spins out of control.
During Saturday’s final, Osaka needed the full range of her talents to squeak by Kvitová, a celebrated power player in her own right. The two players went toe-to-toe from the baseline over three tight sets, with each hitting 33 winners but Kvitová committing 39 unforced errors to Osaka’s 33. Osaka won the first in a tiebreak and held three match points on Kvitová’s serve at 5–3 in the second. But the 6-foot, left-handed player from the Czech Republic saved the first match point with an absolutely scintillating inside-out forehand, a shot that floored Osaka and injected Kvitová with newfound confidence. Kvitová went on to win four games in a row and the second set, a turn of events that temporarily flummoxed Osaka, who struggled to maintain her composure and briefly left the court before the third set. But once play recommenced, it was all business from the young Japanese phenom. She betrayed almost no emotion as she went about breaking Kvitová early in the third set and holding serve throughout the third set to close out the match.
In many respects, the fact that Kvitová made it to the final felt like a moral victory worth celebrating. In 2016, an armed intruder attacked Kvitová in her home in the Czech Republic, leaving her with severe knife wounds to her dominant left hand. That she’s been able to come back from that incident and regain the form that helped her win two Wimbledon titles, in 2011 and 2014, is already the feel-good sport story of the year. But on Saturday, her best simply wasn’t enough; Kvitová played a good match but at times seemed staggered by the speed and depth of the shots Osaka routinely sent over the net.
In victory, Osaka emanated a combination of humility, sweetness, and uncertainty. (While accepting the trophy, she told the crowd that public speaking wasn’t her strong suit, then admitted she’d forgotten the notes she’d written down to guide her through the speech.) But don’t be distracted by that self-deprecating humor. After sealing the match and kneeling down on the court for a moment, Osaka got up and flashed a look of pure confidence to her box. It was similar to the look she gave after sealing her semifinal victory with an ace. Naomi Osaka knows she belongs. She’s a star who promises to be around for quite some time, and her victory in Melbourne represents the dawn of a new era.
If women’s tennis has modeled parity in recent years, then the men’s tour has been the epitome of hierarchy, with Federer, Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray winning 53 of the last 60 grand-slam titles, a run of dominance the likes of which tennis has never experienced. Before the start of this year’s tournament, Murray announced his intention to retire, because of a lingering hip injury, at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future. The specter of Murray’s forthcoming retirement and some superb play in the early rounds by several young players initially gave this edition of the men’s Australian Open a feel of generational shift. When the 20-year-old Greek wunderkind Stefanos Tsitsipas, whose good looks and flowing locks evoke images of Apollo himself, upset Federer in the fourth round, John McEnroe literally told the gathered crowd in Rod Laver Arena, “You’re watching the changing of the guard.”
That sense of change was resolutely quashed in the semifinals when Nadal and Djokovic, respectively, demolished Tsitsipas and the 24-year-old Lucas Pouille, setting up a final between the top two players in the world that will start on Sunday at 3:30 a.m. eastern time. The intensity of those two beatdowns—Tsitsipas won only six games against Nadal; Pouille took a mere four off Djokovic—should serve as a reminder that any proclamations of a coming sea change in men’s tennis are pure hyperbole. At the moment, Djokovic and Nadal are the two best players in the men’s game by a long shot, and even at the ripe old age of 37, Federer is still a force to be reckoned with on faster courts, such as the lawns of Wimbledon. Murray’s diminished status technically marks the dissolution of the Big Four, but it’s safe to bet that this year’s grand-slam trophies will fall into the hands of the Remaining Three.
The only thing different about this year’s Australian Open is the undercurrent of discord and dissent that has accompanied it. At the beginning of the tournament, it was revealed that players on the men’s side were allegedly at loggerheads over the future of Chris Kermode, the current executive chairman of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), whose tenure in that position is set to expire later this year. According to those reports, Djokovic is one of the players in favor of removing Kermode, while Nadal and Federer support extending his tenure. The leaking of this story led to some finger-pointing, with Stan Wawrinka openly blaming Djokovic for the acrimony, Nadal’s coach Carlos Moya claiming that Djokovic “must have his own reasons” for wanting Kermode gone, and Djokovic insisting that reports of his opposition to Kermode are not entirely accurate.
In many respects, this particular spat registers as nothing more than an inconsequential contretemps. Arguments over governance issues don’t tend to spill onto the court or affect how players compete against one another. But in addition to the previously unimaginable level of dominance that Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray have unleashed upon the sport, this generation has also ushered in an almost unprecedented era of effusive sportsmanship, characterized by epic post-match bro hugs and oh-too-cute social-media shout-outs. Federer and Djokovic had a few minor disagreements early in their rivalry, but ever since then, nothing but love and respect has been exchanged between the top players. As a result, even a hint of internal strife, such as a disagreement over the ATP chairman, can be a bit disorienting.
I don’t expect Djokovic and Nadal’s alleged disagreement to manifest itself in any detectable way during Sunday’s final. The two have already played 52 times, an Open Era record, and treated fans to every kind of outcome imaginable, from protracted nail-biters to one-sided beatdowns. Still, a match in which they offer any hint of personal drama is the only potential twist left in this storied rivalry. Maybe this will be the year.
Roger Stone opened the door early Friday morning to a group of gun-toting FBI agents and a seven-count federal indictment—the latest arrest in the Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Robert Mueller’s chatty, informative indictment underscores Stone’s fierce loyalty to Donald Trump, and proves a larger point, too: Character is destiny. Roger Stone’s downfall is the logical conclusion of continuing to act like Roger Stone.
Stone is perfectly suited for the age of clickbait. He’s got a flamboyant wardrobe, a Nixon tattoo, and a flair for getting people to laugh at him. He has a brand: truculent and unjustified self-confidence, meandering trash-talking, and a penchant for lashing out at perceived enemies. These things make him a reliable eye-catcher. Nobody ever changed the channel when Stone was trying to talk himself out of trouble. But these same qualities make Stone and people like him easy targets for a ruthless prosecutor. The indictment depicts Stone acting in private more or less the way he acts in public. The special counsel has charged Stone with five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness tampering, and one count of obstructing a House intelligence probe into Russian interference.
[Read: Decades of dirty tricks finally catch up to Roger Stone]
The indictment charges that Stone eagerly pitched himself to the Trump campaign as the man with connections to WikiLeaks (thinly disguised as “Organization 1” in the document); that he vigorously mined his network to suggest questions for WikiLeaks to answer, amid a media blitz in which he touted upcoming leaks about Trump's Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton. The indictment identifies Stone’s WikiLeaks connection only as “Person 1,” but news reports have repeatedly identified him as the author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. The indictment identifies Stone’s favorite media contact as “Person 2,” someone who is widely believed to be Randy Credico, a dog-fancying talk-show host who comes off as a slightly dim off-Broadway understudy for the role of Stone. The common theme of Stone’s compulsive texts and emails to Corsi, Credico, and the Trump campaign was not just an appetite for dirt on Clinton, but Stone’s own relentless self-promotion. It appears he was successful in getting the attention he wanted—the indictment reveals that a “high-ranking Trump Campaign official” sent Stone a text message reading “well done” after WikiLeaks released stolen Clinton campaign emails in October 2016.
None of this was a crime. The indictment doesn’t suggest that Stone directed, or even knew of in advance, specific illegal acts like hacking. Being thirsty for leaks doesn’t violate federal law. But when congressional investigations began, Stone’s combativeness became a liability, as it has for so many Trump associates. According to Mueller’s probe, Stone kept lying. The indictment said Stone lied in a letter to members of a congressional intelligence committee about not having any communications related to its investigation, then doubled down under oath. Court documents also say that Stone concealed his many text and email conversations with people, including Corsi and Credico, in which he was seeking dirt about Clinton from WikiLeaks. Mueller’s account states that Stone lied about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks through Corsi, trying to portray the hapless Credico as his WikiLeaks contact. The indictment also says Stone lied about his discussions with the Trump campaign concerning these efforts, along with his knowledge of WikiLeaks’ upcoming releases. Stone idolizes Nixon and aspires to dirty tricks—this, too, is part of his brand. It may not have occurred to him to do anything but lie.
[Read: Trumpworld follows a “Godfather” script—literally ]
Most cinematically, the special counsel charges that Stone turned on Credico, bullying and threatening him in an effort to get Credico to shut up or support Stone’s story. The indictment says that Stone quoted Richard Nixon: “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan.” Stone, according to the indictment, also invoked The Godfather: Part II, telling Credico to do a “Frank Pentangeli,” referencing a character who tells Congress he knows nothing of Michael Corleone and then kills himself in prison. Perhaps Stone hoped that Credico hadn’t watched the whole movie. Eventually, Stone allegedly turned to abuse and threats, calling Credico a rat and a stoolie, threatening to take his dog away, and telling him to “prepare to die,” the indictment said. Stone did all of this in writing because—again—Roger Stone can’t stop being Roger Stone. Credico, for his part, repeatedly advised Stone to smarten up, stop perjuring himself, and tell the truth. When Randy Credico is the most sensible person in your indictment, you’ve fallen upon hard times.
Most people wouldn’t perjure themselves in easily detectable ways to Congress and threaten a talkative witness in writing. But Roger Stone isn’t most people. Roger Stone is a character lovingly crafted by Roger Stone. And now Stone is facing prison time because he couldn’t seem to grasp the distinction between a television persona and a prudent response to a federal investigation. The lesson is an old one, drilled into our heads repeatedly in the past two years: Media strategies are not sound legal strategies. Mueller continues to take down Trump associates who could not bring themselves to lawyer up, assert their Fifth Amendment rights, and stop riding the cable-news circuit. But it’s not clear that any of them—including the president himself—have learned that lesson.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s inner circle keeps violating the Stringer Bell rule]
A white-collar-criminal defense attorney’s hardest job often is persuading clients to shut up. Their clients see themselves as Masters of the Universe and have and have enjoyed great success by being dynamic, decisive, and persuasive. They have a hard time accepting that the very volubility that got them where they are can send them to federal prison. But it’s getting easier. Lawyers used to have to make 15-year-old references to Martha Stewart’s conviction to wheedle clients into a prudent silence. In the age of Mueller, they can just point to the front page of nearly any newspaper.
On December 19 of last year, as reported here, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution to keep the government funded and avoid a shutdown, while postponing decisions about “the wall” until later on. At the time there was every indication that Donald Trump’s administration had agreed to the deal. As a CNN story reported:
“Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, the current no. 2 highest-ranking Senate Republican, predicted on Wednesday that Trump would sign it. ‘He will sign a clean CR,’ Cornyn told CNN.”
But then the next day, December 20, after criticism from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, various Fox News figures, and others that Trump was being “weak” and a “loser” by agreeing to the deal, Trump changed his mind. And the shutdown, with all its damage, would soon begin.
On January 25, Donald Trump agreed to the same deal he could have had five weeks earlier, without a shutdown. (For The Atlantic, David Graham explains that reality here; Russell Berman here; and Alex Wagner here.) From all the carnage of the past five weeks, he gained exactly nothing.
The hundreds of thousands of families under financial strain; the disruption of long-term scientific projects; the damage to the national parks — these and other consequences of the shutdown were all for … nothing.
By many accounts (e.g. this), Donald Trump did not understand enough about the mechanics of the government to recognize what a shutdown might do, or why the political fundamentals of his confrontation with the Democrats were skewed against him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did understand all of that — and could have curtailed the damage any time in the past few weeks by allowing the Senate to vote on a “clean CR,” a measure to end the shutdown and defer debates on the wall. Since the beginning of the new congressional session this month, all signs have been that such a measure would pass the Senate (as Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, eloquently argued two weeks ago).
But McConnell refused all requests to let the Senate vote. As with Trump’s December 20 flip, from support of a compromise bill to dead-set opposition, his stand affected countless Americans. And was for nothing.
John CuneoA single line of dialogue in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, spoken by a character based on his mother to a character based on his childhood caretaker, lays bare the theme of the entire film. “No matter what they tell you,” the mother says, “we women are always alone.”
By the time she makes this pronouncement, more than an hour and a half in, it feels like an understatement. Set in early-1970s Mexico City and photographed in neorealist black-and-white so crystalline that the picture looks as if it could shatter into a million pieces, the film opens on a frantic scramble in a household based on Cuarón’s. Antonio, the character inspired by Cuarón’s father, returns from his job as a surgeon in his growling, monstrous, regal Ford Galaxie and attempts to maneuver it into a garage far too narrow for its girth, smooshing a pile of fresh dog crap along the way.
The space is so tight that he must slide across the passenger seat to get out of the car and into the house. Shortly after we see him for the first time, we hear him berate his wife, Sofia. She tries unsuccessfully to appease him, even though (as we will later learn) she knows he’s having an affair. His mood worsens further the next day, when he steps in the aforementioned pile; in turn, Sofia trains her ire on the family’s maid and caretaker, Cleo, snapping at her for failing to clean up the mess. Cleo heads out to the driveway and gets busy shoveling shit.
“This is the representation of Antonio, his introduction,” Cuarón told me in December, when I visited him at the Chateau Marmont, in Hollywood. “You don’t see Antonio until the very end of the scene. Everything is introduced through all this ballet of the car parking.”
[Why Netflix’s ‘Roma’ is playing in theaters first]
Cuarón was holed up in one of the hotel’s meticulously shabby-luxe suites, the kind with a funky old kitchen and a weathered icebox, waiting for Roma’s Los Angeles premiere that evening. He was jet-lagged—he had just arrived from London, where he lives—but was nonetheless in a good mood, maybe because Roma was already one of the year’s best-reviewed movies, and seemed well positioned to win a raft of awards. (It has since received Golden Globes for best foreign-language film and best director.) He’s obnoxiously handsome for a guy behind the camera rather than in front of it. Although he is 57, he could pass for a decade younger, if not for his perfectly blended salt-and-pepper hair.
As a boy, Cuarón continued, his family had an old Valiant—a cheap car made by Chrysler for foreign markets—that had bumps and scratches everywhere. But he was fond of it all the same, and was ambivalent when the hulking Galaxie arrived. The Galaxie, which was imported from the U.S. market, was at first glance the more impressive car. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, it has all of this stuff.’ ” But as Cuarón’s parents’ marriage fell apart, it became a flash point. Now the car looms as a metaphor, a symbol of his father’s masculinity (“not eight cylinders but eight testosterone”) and also of his parents’ materialism and class envy. It was a used Ford, which always went unmentioned, and yes, it had all this cool stuff—power steering! air-conditioning!—but the AC was always breaking.
One of the last images in the opening sequence before Cuarón finally gives us a glimpse of Antonio’s face is the car’s hood ornament, a silver crown, coming straight at the camera. “In a way, it’s a penetration. It’s a car that is way too big for that garage,” he said, adding that the marriage has “social pretensions.” Much later in the film, after Antonio abandons the family, Sofia sells the Ford and gets a more modest car that fits in the garage with room to spare.
“She drives with a completely different attitude,” he says. “It’s the first time that you see Sofia with that kind of smile.”
Coursing through all of Cuarón’s films and especially Roma is a sense that the artist who made them loves, even worships, women but is not too sure about men. Though Roma takes place half a century ago, in Mexico, it can easily be read as a critique of Trumpism and #MeToo-era masculinity.
Like plenty of directors, Cuarón tries to avoid connecting the dots in his work, or examining too closely the source of his creative impulses. And yet there is no escaping the fact that his affection for his female characters—and his ambivalence toward the male ones—is encoded in each film he’s made, beginning with his 1991 feature debut, Sólo con Tu Pareja, a modern sex-comedy spin on Don Giovanni, about an advertising copywriter who is simultaneously bedding multiple women (including his neighbors, his boss, and his nurse) until one of them tricks him into thinking he has aids. (It is a movie, Cuarón says, about “an idiot.”) Cuarón made a pair of Hollywood films next: A Little Princess, based on the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic about a plucky orphan, came out in 1995, and remains particularly dear to Cuarón. He followed it, in 1998, with a Manhattan-set update of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which ostensibly starred Ethan Hawke but in reality revolved around a young Gwyneth Paltrow. Cuarón then went home to Mexico City for 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También, about a dying woman’s road trip with two randy, self-involved teenage boys, a film so soaked with hot sex that he was, to put it mildly, a bold choice by Warner Bros. for the third (and best) Harry Potter installment, The Prisoner of Azkaban. (I was briefly on the set during filming, in 2003, and if you watch the film now, you may notice what I did then: Cuarón seems far more interested in Hermione Granger than in anyone else at Hogwarts—including Harry.)
In 2006 came Children of Men, a brutal tale of what Cuarón calls “spiritual sterility,” about a miraculously pregnant woman in a childless future, a dystopia in which men kill for control of the baby and women die trying to protect it. When he thinks about that film now, Cuarón says he can still feel the antipatriarchal rage that drove it. His next film, Gravity, took seven years to arrive, but when it did, it was a global smash, winning an Oscar for best director—making Cuarón the first Latino director to win the award. Gravity is also—if you disregard the mansplaining ghost of George Clooney—perhaps Cuarón’s most overtly feminist film by dint of its conceit and perspective: Sandra Bullock, alone, tumbling through space, willing herself to live.
[Christopher Orr: The spectacular simplicity of ‘Gravity’]
Which brings us to Roma. At the center of the family depicted in the film stands a quiet young woman who isn’t, technically, a member of the family: Cleo, who is based on Cuarón’s adored real-life nanny and housekeeper, Libo. “I used to call her Mama,” he told me, and then, when he was 5 or 6, “I wanted to marry her.” His father left when he was 9 years old, and his mother, grief-stricken, found herself overwhelmed by the task of acting as the sole parent to four children; Libo, far from her own family in Oaxaca, filled the void.
“There’s an absence in my life, there’s an absence in my mother’s life, and also an absence in Libo’s life,” Cuarón said. In each case, he went on, other people—“men, mainly”—had gone away. This was the one constant: “Women taking charge in raising families. And an absence of men.” Some were physically absent, he says; others were “just not present.”
Cuarón served as his own cinematographer on Roma—the first time he has served as the director of photography for a feature film, and a last-minute solution after his longtime collaborator (and childhood friend) Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki had to leave the film because of a family matter. This wound up working to the film’s advantage, though: There’s no distance between Cuarón and his camera. In stark contrast to the hurtling velocity of his previous film, Gravity, Roma is all stillness and slow pans. Cuarón knows exactly where to look and what he’s trying to see: all the ways he was unaware of his good fortune and of Libo’s role in maintaining it.
To hear Cuarón tell it, the film is his penance to Libo. “I felt I owe something to her,” he said, “almost like owing an explanation.” That has meant reckoning with the truth of his upbringing, his entitlement, the fact that he was empowered, as a child, “to give orders.” If he’d simply revisited his own tale, albeit with more attention to Libo’s life, he’d have risked continuing his solipsism. Instead, the character based on Cuarón is barely on-screen at all. The family has three boys, and it’s never entirely clear which of the elder two is meant to be Cuarón. To make the movie faithfully, he had several long conversations with Libo about their past, and he was captivated by her stories about who she was when she wasn’t his caretaker—“her social life outside the bubble,” he says. “My bubble.”
At one point in Roma, Cleo goes on a date with a handsome, driven young man who is poor like her; after they’ve slept together, Cuarón shows Cleo in her slip, lying modestly under the covers, watching her lover demonstrate his martial-arts virtuosity, his postcoital penis flopping everywhere as he spins and kicks. Like almost everything else we see, this is based on a real moment from Libo’s life. Cuarón said he wanted the young man’s nakedness to convey both his weakness—his “wounded soul”; the ways Mexico’s class system and rural poverty have stunted his life—and his self-assured machismo. “This kid bragging about his athletic skill, bragging about his own nakedness. It’s very vain,” Cuarón said.
As Cleo watches him, she stifles a giggle, a sweet detail but one that introduces a hint of tension to the scene; this is not, we sense, a young man who will respond well to being laughed at. Before long, Cleo discovers she’s pregnant with his child; moments after she tells him the news, he slips out of the movie theater where they are sitting and doesn’t return. We see him twice more in the film. The first time, he threatens to kill Cleo if she comes looking for him again. The second time, he points a gun at her, her water breaks, and tragedy follows.
[Franklin Foer: Mexico’s revenge]
In each of Cuarón’s three most recent films, a lost child haunts the main character. He jokes that this only proves “how little imagination I have.” Fair enough—dead children are often (too often) deployed in movies to set a plot in motion, or to excuse a character’s otherwise inexcusable behavior. For Cuarón, though, the death of a child is less a plot device than a running metaphor for despair. In Children of Men, one man’s grief over his lost child epitomizes the misery of a childless society—“an existence without hope,” Cuarón told me. He wasn’t interested in examining or explaining why this mass sterility happened so much as he was interested in portraying the interconnectedness of motherhood and faith in the future. Gravity’s true subject is a woman so crushed by the death of her child that she’s on the brink of letting go and drifting off into the blackness. And in Roma, the lost child is literal, palpable—the subject of the movie’s most heartbreaking sequence, the gut punch after 90 minutes of paper cuts.
As we continued our conversation, Cuarón sipped hot green tea and refilled a glass of water from a sweaty carafe. The sound of someone plunking into a pool outside drifted through an open window. I pressed him again as to why he’d written a child’s death into three straight scripts, and he grinned and moved to lie down on the couch. “Take your notepad,” he said, “and I’m gonna lay here.” When he was writing Children of Men, he had a son in his 20s—Jonás, who is now a filmmaker, and who co-wrote Gravity. Cuarón has since had two more children. That must be part of the explanation, he reasons now: As a parent, he knows that losing a child is the ultimate fear.
“If I get Darwinian,” he says, his face brightening far more than most people’s do when they say Darwinian, “hope is nothing but the possibility of our species to keep on going. If you cut out that biological link, you’re just cutting all of that. If you translate that into emotional terms, it’s that exactly. That’s hope.”
Roma ends with a scene of domestic tranquility—the fatherless Cuarón family, gathered around the television to watch an episode of The Porky Pig Show. Some time has passed since Cleo’s lover abandoned her, and the family—now numbering four kids, three women (including Sofia’s mother), and no men—has just returned home from a trip to the beach, one that would have ended in another tragedy had Cleo not saved the day. “Everybody’s so excited to be back home,” Cuarón said to me, narrating a bit of the scene, “and they’re talking about how much they love Cleo; they love her so much that they want to visit her town in Oaxaca.”
Even though the movie was filmed in black-and-white, the scene is so warm as to appear incandescent. Years from this moment, Cuarón tells me, the woman whom Cleo is based upon will become pregnant again and this time her baby will survive; she and her daughter, now grown herself, still live in that same home, the one where Cuarón was raised, the one he re-created for Roma. It’s theirs now as much as his. It was hers then, too—except when it wasn’t. As the movie winds to a close, the women and children laugh at the TV, and then the kids ask Cleo to get them some snacks. She leaves the room and heads downstairs to prepare their food.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “Women and Children First.”
One afternoon in April 2016, four friends in the Netherlands got drunk, took some ecstasy, and stared into a fish tank. They were feeling particularly inspired by an old episode of the TV show Jackass—specifically, a segment in which the stunt personality Steve-O swallows a live goldfish. So they dunked their empty glasses into the tank, scooped up a small collection of goldfish one at a time, and gulped them down. The group washed down the fish with more beer.
Once all the goldfish were polished off, according to an in-depth case report published last week by physicians at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, a 28-year-old man volunteered to take his turn with the one remaining fish in the tank: a nearly two-and-a-half-inch-long bronze catfish that another participant had found too large to ingest. A video reportedly shows the catfish swallower attempting to gulp down the flopping animal with a swig of beer amid chants of “Grote vis! Grote vis!” (“Big fish! Big fish!”).
[Read: 1939: The year of goldfish gulping]
The man began to gag. His friends watched, horrified, as he vomited beer and jammed his fingers down his throat. He started spewing blood into a bucket, and eventually was admitted to intensive care to have the fish dislodged from his throat.
Even Steve-O might have thought twice before swallowing a live catfish. Unlike the harmless goldfish, Corydoras aeneus, also known as the “Cory” catfish, is armored with strong, overlapping scales. And it shares a famous defense mechanism with almost all of its catfish cousins: spinelike barbs embedded within each fin. When the fish is distressed, these barbs straighten and lock into place, turning the animal from a tropical pet into a sort of aquatic shuriken.
When the man arrived at the hospital, all he was able to tell doctors through the drugs and alcohol was that he was having trouble swallowing, according to Linda Benoist, the Erasmus otorhinolaryngology resident who treated him. It wasn’t until the doctors spotted a fin in his throat that he could recall more specifically what had happened.
A CT scan shows the tightly lodged fish (Linda Benoist / Erasmus University Medical Center).This is far from the first time someone has swallowed a live fish. What’s rare is for it to turn into a medical emergency: A recent study found 75 recorded cases of live-fish aspiration over the past several centuries, only four of which were voluntary. But those reports only account for failed attempts to down live fish. The practice has been a go-to gag for American goofballs and pranksters for decades. As panty raids, planking, and eating Tide Pods have come and gone, fish swallowing has remained—usually in the form of goldfish, and sometimes minnows or other teeny-tiny species.
The father of modern goldfish swallowing, the lore goes, was—perhaps unsurprisingly—an 18-year-old college student. In 1939, Lothrop Withington Jr., a freshman at Harvard, reportedly prompted a friend to issue him the challenge alongside a $10 payout. The stunt was considered so outlandish at the time that the crowd that showed up to watch the spectacle contained multiple reporters. By all accounts, Withington chewed.
As The Harvard Crimson later recounted, Withington’s bold challenge quickly caught on. A Harvard sophomore won local notoriety—and job offers from multiple circuses—that same year after swallowing 23 goldfish in just 10 minutes. Soon students at other schools were vying to break the record, and the Intercollegiate Goldfish Gulping Association (IGGA) was established to determine and enforce competition standards. There were only two rules: first, that each fish measured three inches long, and second, that the fish be kept down for at least 12 hours after consumption. Challengers emerged from campuses far and wide, until the last title on record went to Clark University’s Joseph Deliberto, who sucked down 89.
The height of the craze (and the IGGA) lasted only for the school year, but fish swallowing has never really gone away. Pushback from animal-rescue groups led most colleges to outlaw the practice in the early 1940s, which likely helped fuel the rise of goldfish gulping as a fixture of collegiate hazing rituals. It’s now regularly listed as an offense on lawsuits and sanctions brought against fraternities and sports teams. In addition to Jackass’s rendition, the practice has popped up in at least three major films spanning four decades: A Fish Called Wanda, The Wolf of Wall Street, and, most recently, Aquaman. YouTube is full of videos of people of all ages throwing guppies down their gullets.
[Read: Are rabbits pets or meat?]
Even with restrictions in place, students have long played drinking games that incorporate the spirit of Withington’s original bet, chasing with beer just as their parents’ generations did. At Colby College in Maine, swallowing goldfish is a tradition during Doghead, an annual booze-soaked St. Patrick’s Day celebration with murky origins. A Petco employee in the nearby town of Augusta told me that he’s learned to spot Colby students shopping for Doghead goldfish each March and tries to avoid selling them any. (He asked to remain anonymous, since he’s not authorized to speak for Petco.) Several other pet stores in the area carry only other types of fish.
In 2014, PETA implored Colby to put an end to the Doghead tradition. The college has noted that it does not sanction or support Doghead, and that “swallowing live goldfish is unsafe and at odds with Colby’s institutional values.”
Fish swallowing hasn’t been limited to campuses. Kate Paschal, the mother of one of my colleagues, remembers swallowing a goldfish at a youth-group event in the mid-’80s. She says that the youth pastor at her evangelical church in Iowa suggested the activity and sent parent chaperones out to purchase the fish. “Only a few of us participated,” Paschal says. “But I was the one who would tend to do stuff like that … It was pretty slippery and slimy. But I was probably too full of adrenaline to think about the taste.”
A few cases of goldfish swallowing have resulted in police involvement. On January 8, 21-year-old Maxwell Taffin was arrested and charged with animal cruelty for allegedly swallowing a friend’s pet fish in a Louisiana State University dorm room. A year ago, a British man faced similar charges for a fish-swallowing video uploaded to Facebook.
The dubious legality of gorging yourself on goldfish raises an odd question: Where is the line between pet fish and food fish? Swallowing goldfish poses little health risk, and the fish are hardly rare or endangered. In other parts of the world, live seafood remains a delicacy rather than a crime. Korean sannakji is a specialty dish of live octopus served freshly dismembered (and still squirming) beneath a garnish of sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds. Odori ebi, or “dancing shrimp,” half-drowned in sake, are eaten in both Japan and Thailand. Yet many countries, including a few where these dishes have originated, have struck them from the menu over animal-cruelty concerns.
Living creatures with highly effective defense mechanisms, meanwhile, seem obviously unfit for consumption. The man who swallowed the catfish is now alive and well, though he has been careful not to share his name publicly, for fear of retaliation from animal-rights activists. The fish itself wasn’t so lucky: It died from either an onslaught of beer or simply being outside its tank for too long.
Even so, the fish has achieved eternal fame at the nearby Natural History Museum Rotterdam, where it remains a top attraction at the Dead Animal Tales exhibit, a grisly array of some of humankind’s most unfortunate encounters with the animal kingdom. The fish is mostly intact, but its tail mysteriously disappeared during the ordeal. It might have been the only part of the fish to actually make it down. The Intercollegiate Goldfish Gulping Association would be proud.
The Other Two, Comedy Central’s new series, has visual jokes so sharp that you could watch it with the sound off and it would still be funnier than many other shows. There’s Chase Dreams (Case Walker), a 13-year-old internet superstar whose look is Justin Bieber on mushrooms: harem pants, gold chains, leather jackets that seem like they’re made out of a multipack of neon markers. Chase’s mother, Pat (Molly Shannon), has an aesthetic that’s solidly Ohio-mom-meets-Kate-Gosselin, all fuchsia lace and tiger-striped hair. A running gag on the series is that Chase is subletting an apartment that belongs to the actor Justin Theroux, featuring a motorcycle toilet and a walk-in closet exclusively populated with black leather boots.
These moments are really just sprinkles, though—added extras on The Other Two’s piquant serving of generational satire. The show isn’t really about Chase, who becomes impossibly famous overnight after a song he posts online, “I Wanna Marry U at Recess,” goes viral. It’s about his slacker Millennial siblings, Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary (Drew Tarver), a former dancer and a struggling actor, respectively, who find themselves vaulted into a brave new world of Gen-Z celebrities. In art, as in life, the kids are deftly navigating the waters of Instagram fame, LLCs, online activism, and desperate brands. It’s the adults who can’t keep up. (Richard Kind plays Cary’s agent, whose many side hustles become one of the show’s more poignant themes.)
[Read: Why are young people having so little sex?]
The crux of The Other Two is that, while Chase’s fame makes Brooke and Cary look even worse at life by comparison, the pair is determined to hitch its stars to his wagon. “We must live every day like it’s the last day Chase is famous,” Brooke determines. But as in any good fish-out-of-water comedy, the other two are totally out of place. Brooke, trying to network at a premiere after-party, gapes when she hears teenagers conversing about the benefits of LLCs versus S corps. Cary, trying to get enough followers to score an audition for a new Ryan Murphy show, cozies up to a group of self-described “Instagays” to leech off their fan base, but is completely befuddled by the dynamics of influencer life. The bigger Chase gets, the stronger his siblings’ thirst.
The series is acutely keen satire with a pantomathic cultural IQ, dropping references to the most-online personalities (from Logan Paul to Tomi Lahren), the indignity of post-internet fame (“Burger King is ripping him apart,” Cary says, wincing, after Chase’s botched performance is lampooned by the brand on Twitter), and the strange composure of Generation Z amid all this absurdity. It’s also notably dirty for a comedy airing not on HBO.
[Read: How Instagram threads became the WikiHow for Gen Z]
But what elevates The Other Two even more is its heart. Walker’s angelic Chase gets fewer scenes than his siblings, but he’s a sweet kid in such a weird and manipulative world that you long to protect him (Ken Marino plays Chase’s manager, a dubious buffoon in a white Kangol cap). So do Brooke and Cary, for the most part, who end up making the show one of the more endearing family comedies on television, internet porn and frozen penises aside.
Created by the former Saturday Night Live writers Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly, and executive produced by Lorne Michaels, The Other Two feels fully conceived right out of the gate. On the strength of its producers’ connections, there are cameos from Andy Cohen, Patrick Wilson, Mario Lopez, and Hoda Kotb. SNL’s Beck Bennett plays a flight attendant whom Brooke hooks up with, while Wanda Sykes plays Chase’s publicist, a woman constantly managing the vagaries of the internet’s attention span along with her client’s hormones (when Chase gets a pimple, she mutters, “We might have to transition to sexy sooner than I thought”).
It’s the rare show that can be edgily satirical without being cynical. It takes what could be an easy punch line—kids these days!—and inverts it, finding more to lampoon in the desperation of the grown-ups muscling in on tween territory than the actual youths with their airplane album launches, their million-dollar makeup tutorials, and their lives spent online. This is possibly savvy: Schneider and Kelly are making nice with the next generation of influencers even before they accrue significant industry power. But it also makes for a show that’s often smarter and more insightful than it seems.
It didn’t begin with a tweet.
Donald Trump’s decision this week to recognize Venezuela’s opposition leader as the nation’s legitimate president is surprising on many levels. But one of them is that it didn’t arrive as a bolt from the president’s blue-checkmarked Twitter account.
No delicate diplomacy with a nuclear-armed nation was blown to smithereens by a couple hundred dashed-off characters from the commander in chief. No advisers jetted off to reassure allies after a presidential proclamation. No one printed out a tweet and handed it to the American secretary of state so that he could turn it into coherent policy.
[Read: Trump’s dumping of Maduro could be just the start ]
Instead, as Venezuela’s autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro began another term in office after a sham election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo consulted with U.S. partners in South America and beyond. National-Security Adviser John Bolton affirmed the constitutional right of Juan Guaidó, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, to invalidate Maduro’s presidency. On Tuesday, on the eve of widespread antigovernment protests there, Vice President Mike Pence called Guaidó and in an op-ed and a Spanish-sprinkled video expressed solidarity with the Venezuelan people (“Vayan con Dios,” he declared). Within minutes of Guaidó declaring himself interim president at a raucous rally in Caracas on Wednesday afternoon, the White House released a presidential statement recognizing him as the nation’s legitimate leader.
Only then did Trump tweet out the news, just as U.S. officials were briefing journalists and Canada and 10 Latin American countries were joining the United States in expressing support for Guaidó. (European officials acknowledged the National Assembly as the only legitimate democratic institution in Venezuela but stopped short of recognizing Guaidó as a transitional president.)
It was a well-oiled diplomatic campaign, closely coordinated with allies and rigorously on message. It was, in a word, un-Trumpian.
The dissonance didn’t end with the orderly process. Here was a president who preaches America First, who rarely invokes democracy and human rights in his unscripted remarks, who has voiced admiration for dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, sticking his neck out to restore democracy in a country that doesn’t usually figure among the top challenges to U.S. interests.
Asked to explain the president’s anomalous stance on Maduro during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that both Venezuela and the United States are bound to a multinational charter they adopted in 2001 that enshrines representative democracy as the prevailing political system in the Western hemisphere. But the rationale rang hollow. If we’ve learned one thing from Trump’s presidency, it’s that he doesn’t feel the least bit tethered to international agreements when he believes they aren’t in the national interest.
In his first address to the United Nations, Trump attempted to square the circle of how he could both champion national sovereignty and involve the United States in the internal affairs of other countries. A nation’s “two core sovereign duties” are to “respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation,” he stated, implying that shirking either of those duties could invite U.S. intervention.
[Read: The president of the United States asks, ‘What’s an ally?’]
Trump’s Venezuela policy has been carried out by a cadre of advisers who, unlike the president himself, either emphasize American values (Mike Pence) or advocate an interventionist approach to Washington’s enemies (John Bolton and, to a lesser extent, his predecessor H. R. McMaster). Bolton, in particular, has articulated a kind of neo–Monroe Doctrine in which Venezuela is of special significance because it falls within the United States’ regional sphere of influence. It’s “in our hemisphere,” he observed on Thursday, when asked why Trump has punished Maduro while praising other authoritarian leaders.
The Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has called for the Venezuelan military to overthrow Maduro and who brokered a 2017 meeting between Trump and the Venezuelan human-rights activist Lilian Tintori that helped steer Trump in a more hard-line direction, has also played an influential role in crafting the administration’s aggressive posture. Rubio met with Trump on Tuesday and urged him to recognize Guaidó as the “rightful president” of Venezuela. The next day, Trump did exactly that.
On Friday, in between lobbying other Latin American countries and world powers to recognize Guaidó, Pompeo added another hawk to the team. Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle East policy in President George W. Bush’s White House, will serve as the Trump administration’s point person on Venezuela, the secretary of state announced. Abrams pleaded guilty (and was later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration’s support for rebels seeking to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua.
In 2017, he took issue with Trump’s White House stating that it was not seeking regime change in North Korea. “Why ever not?” Abrams wrote. Though he did not advocate invading, he wrote: “This is generally agreed to be the worst regime in the world. … OF COURSE we want a different regime there. The same goes for other countries ruled by horrendous tyrannies, such as Iran and Venezuela.”
Yet what remains remarkably unclear is how U.S. policy will evolve from here. If the Venezuelan security services violently crack down on the opposition and its American supporters, if Guaidó and his international backers struggle to wrest any real power from the Maduro regime, or if Russia comes to Maduro’s rescue and into conflict with the United States, will the Trump administration back down and hang Guaidó and his movement out to dry? Or will it double down by resorting to drastic measures like an oil embargo—which would risk plunging Venezuela even further into chaos—or even dispatching U.S. or coalition forces to the country?
The president has reportedly spoken loosely, in private conversations with aides and regional leaders, of taking military action to address Venezuela’s economic and political implosion under Maduro, and even once made an off-the-cuff remark in public about a “military option.” Administration officials also met with coup-plotting Venezuelan military officers in 2018, according to The New York Times, though the U.S. government did not provide material support to the soldiers and no rebellion materialized. The Venezuelan military, for the time being, has sided with Maduro in his standoff with Guaidó. And despite all the soaring rhetoric of recent days, the reality remains that he who controls the guns controls the government.
But so far the Trump administration’s interventions against the Venezuelan government have mainly come in the form of economic sanctions and political isolation, starting with designating Venezuela’s then–vice president a drug kingpin mere weeks into Trump’s presidency.
[Read: Venezuela is falling apart]
“For whatever reason, and honestly I don't know what the reason was ... President Trump started literally on day one asking about Venezuela,” Fernando Cutz, Trump’s former director for South America on the National Security Council, noted at the Wilson Center last fall.
Perhaps Trump’s rationale is that Venezuela’s collapse has spawned a refugee crisis in the United States’ neighborhood, or that the country has become Exhibit A on the American political right for the nightmarish failures of socialism. (The president has reportedly been affected by cable-news coverage of the deadly protests in Venezuela.) Maybe he was moved by Maduro’s virulent anti-Americanism and the alliance between Venezuela and Cuba, which Barack Obama engaged and Trump repudiated as part of his broader rejection of Obama’s policies. Regardless of what’s motivating the president, he has consistently fixated on the misdeeds of the kleptocrats in Caracas while overlooking those of allied authoritarians like the Saudi royals.
Smooth process, however, may not necessarily translate into sound policy. On Thursday, as critics in Congress warned of the checkered history of U.S. interventions in Latin America and the unintended consequences of economic sanctions for the Venezuelan people, the Trump administration walked back one of its most dramatic acts of the prior day: defying, in lockstep with Guaidó, an order by Maduro kicking American diplomats out of the country in retaliation for the recognition of the opposition leader. The State Department announced that it would be evacuating “non-emergency U.S. government employees,” citing security concerns.
Before there was Jill Stein, there was Ralph Nader. Before there was Nader, there was Ross Perot.
None won. All argued that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were basically the same, and the only way to make real change was to ditch them both. Each was blamed for siphoning off enough votes to throw the presidential elections.
These days, the difference between the parties is starker than it’s ever been in modern times. Yet here comes Howard Schultz, a billionaire who feels that he might be the answer to American politics, and that he’d run for president as an independent.
[Read: Is Starbucks’s Howard Schultz the liberal Donald Trump?]
Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO, says in a 60 Minutes interview already recorded but airing on Sunday that he is thinking very seriously about a presidential run—but he stops short of a full announcement.
He makes clear, however, that if he moves forward, he will do so as an independent.
Already top Democratic operatives working for presidential candidates and beyond say they’re worried that the only thing he’ll accomplish is making sure Donald Trump gets re-elected. It’s more than just sniping at a prospective opponent; word that he might invest in an independent run has many of them clearly worried about how he’d split votes in a general election.
[Read: Is Howard Schultz’s spin bad for Starbucks?]
Schultz has seemed to be moving toward a run for months, with interviews and speeches around the country about the inclusive policies that he says he pioneered while in charge of the company in two stints, totaling 24 years. He also talks about his vision of America, much of it informed by a trip he took to Auschwitz, which he discusses in an emotional story.
In a conversation with Scott Pelley, Schultz called this “a most fragile time.”
“Not only the fact that this president is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics,” he says, according to CBS promotional material, which did not include the part of the interview in which Pelley asks Schultz about running himself. Other people familiar with the interview relayed his answers about those questions.
[Read: A uniquely American Starbucks scandal]
Aides to Schultz did not respond to requests for comment.
“Trump’s strategy has always been divide and conquer, and this plays directly into his hands,” said one Democratic strategist, who was wary of taking on Schultz openly ahead of any announcement. “He’s Ralph Nader without any of Nader’s redeeming qualities. What’s his value proposition for America? Make America like a corporate chain?”
Democrats aren’t the only ones who see Schultz as potentially helping Trump win a second term. Bill Kristol, the Never Trump Republican who is most active both in media appearances and private conversations representing the GOP resistance to the president, said he wouldn’t support an independent run either.
“One reason my colleagues and I are focused on a Republican primary challenge to Trump—apart from the fact that we’re Republicans—is that it doesn’t present any of the problems of inadvertently helping him by being a spoiler,” Kristol wrote in an email.
Schultz, a lifelong Democrat, would run under the theory that the answer to the political division in the country right now is moving away from party politics. There’s little evidence to support that, as people report being more polarized and partisan, devoted to their own party and demonizing the other. For all the prominent Republicans who say they don’t like Trump, the president’s overall approval numbers among voters within his party remain sky high, according to polls. Schultz would have to persuade millions of them to abandon the party to vote for him, while drawing enough Democratic votes away from a party that is energized and excited about taking out the president.
And at 65, he’d have to do that as an older white man who’s never run for office before and has zero national name recognition. There is, however, Schultz’s fortune, estimated at $3.3 billion.
A crew was recently spotted filming at the Starbucks location in Pike Place Market in Seattle, a tourist spot known as the chain’s first location, according to The Seattle Times.
“There’s a lot of things I can do as a private citizen other than a run for the presidency of the United States,” he said last June in an interview on CNBC announcing he was stepping down from Starbucks. He added: “I don’t know what that means right now.”
But he spoke in that interview about fighting for dignity, a topic he was particularly vocal about after the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that Donald Trump equivocated on. He said he’d delayed his own exit from Starbucks to deal with the fallout from the incident last year when two black men in Philadelphia were asked to leave one of the chain’s stores.
For the past year, Schultz has been investing in burnishing his image and strategizing by hiring a number of experienced consultants, most prominently Steve Schmidt, the 2008 campaign manager for John McCain. Schmidt has spent the past 10 years on a mea culpa tour for his hand in Sarah Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate, which took him first to being an MSNBC contributor, then to leaving the Republican Party, and now to guiding this effort.
Schultz wrote a book, For Love of Country, co-written with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a former Washington Post reporter who’s been on staff with him for years and continues to be in his inner circle planning the run. Another book, From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, is out January 28.
Tina Podlodowski, the Washington State Democratic chair, blasted the idea of Schultz running as an independent in the press last week. She underscored her point on Friday in a fundraising email sent to donors, with the subject line “Howard Schultz could secure Trump’s re-election.”
“This worst-case scenario keeps me up at night. I want to spend our resources fighting for Democrats up and down the ballot, not fending off Howard Schultz’s independent bid,” she wrote.
Several top Washington State Democrats complained that Schultz was never an active ally on progressive causes. Podlodowski has said publicly she’d like to meet with him to discuss the presidential campaign, but so far has not heard from him or his aides, according to a state-party spokesperson.
Kristol wrote that he sees a silver lining to a run that doesn’t seem to be the billionaire’s intention: “For 2019 at least, the fact that serious people like Howard Schultz are considering an independent race might help bring home to more voters, including independents and some Republicans, how important it is to replace Trump. So in that respect it’s a good thing.”
Broad City creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer once did nearly an entire episode of their show as a cartoon while their characters, Abbi and Ilana, tripped on mushrooms. This week’s premiere of the Comedy Central staple’s final season has a different format gimmick: Most of it was shot on an iPhone to resemble an Instagram (or Snapchat, or Facebook) Story. But the oddly moving and expectedly deranged saga ended up hinting that technology might be our era’s psychedelic drug of choice, for better and worse.
Not that Abbi and Ilana’s lives aren’t trippy anyway. The raunchy Brooklyn besties inhabit a world in which Kelly Ripa is a monstrous drunk and New York City’s undelivered mail is guarded by an elderly woman named “Garol.” For Abbi’s 30th birthday, the roommates embark on a quest that’s not really far-fetched: walking from the “tippity top to the tippity bottom” of Manhattan on one sunny day. Along the way they have exactly the sort of experiences you’d expect of a Broad City episode. Ilana falls down a manhole. Abbi runs into an unstable friend from college who accuses her of pedophilia. Both of their phones end up destroyed. And so on!
For once, though, viewers experience this mayhem as if mediated by the characters to their friends. It’s not technically an Instagram Story we’re watching—for one thing, all the images are horizontal. But the sensibility is the same: reality augmented for greater zaniness. Ilana kisses at the camera, and little cartoon sparks fly from her lips. Emojis stick like Post-it notes to characters and objects. It’s all there: funny captions, pseudo-dramatic super-zoom effects, questions for followers (e.g., “R these the faces of pedos? YES / NO,” as Abbi and Ilana run from mall security).
Ilana and Abbi have a wacky social-media sensibility, of course, but also a recognizable one. When Abbi is captured talking glumly about how she expected to have kids by age 30, the seriousness is cut by Ilana inserting her own raised-eyebrow face into the video. While trapped at the bottom of a sewer, Ilana takes a selfie, adds an R&B background track, and writes, “Fell down a womanhole … still feeling mah’ self.” In a weird way, the verisimilitude of the social-media bedazzling—the fact that the style if not the substance of this Instagram Story might not be out of place in the average user’s feed—pierces the heightened reality of the show. What are Stories for if not to make everyone’s own normal lives look a bit like Broad City?
Another kinda-meta effect that the episode takes advantage of is using the documentary feel of iPhone footage to make it seem like it’s capturing Abbi and Ilana as “real” people. These aren’t characters scripted for a sitcom; they’re buddies on your feed. Or so it seems, thanks to Glazer, Jacobson, and the director Nick Paley deftly assembling a story full of incident that still doesn’t seem over-narrativized. But in that, they did what people already do—or at least the most skillful users do—on their apps. As Paley told The Hollywood Reporter, “The expectation with social media stories is that time is jumping moment to moment, and that is a gift in terms of storytelling, because it lets you get to the most interesting part of a scene.”
That the characters are more “real” in this format allows for a surprising amount of emotional impact. Abbi’s mixed feelings about turning 30 are hinted at throughout the episode, and eventually Ilana walks in on her pouting in the bathroom during brunch. You glimpse Abbi’s sad face just for a second, and then the Story cuts to Ilana’s writing: “Birthday blues … they real y’all.” It’s a shockingly effective moment, and I went a little verklempt. Ilana then tells her followers that she asked Abbi whether she should delete the footage of her in the bathroom, but that Abbi said no. There it is, all the contradictions of social media: truth but curated, and unapologetically so.
The episode picks at other eerie things about today’s technology culture. Again and again, Abbi and Ilana invade the privacy of people on the street and make content out of service workers just doing their jobs. At one point—this is a great gag—Abbi shows off her new credit card, and in the very next post, Ilana yells at her followers for having stolen the identification number. “Cheese,” the nicknamed college classmate of Abbi’s, clearly has resentment from raising four kids while watching Abbi’s zany life unfold. Abbi, meanwhile, has been jealously watching Cheese’s domestic-mom bliss from afar. It’s only in person that they’re able to (eventually) see each other as people.
Overall, though, most of the episode comes off as refreshingly unstressed about social media’s effects. Or, at least, it leans into what makes something like Instagram Stories so addictive and joyful. But when Abbi and Ilana are back home at the end of the adventure, the show seems to render a negative verdict on the technology at hand. The two women realize that they barely remember the day because they were so busy filming it all. The experience, shared with everyone, hardly belonged to them. It’s as if they’ve awoken from a dream, or a drug-induced hallucination. But unlike with people tripping in public, it’s at least been fun for others to watch.
On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Democrats to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The deal was a concession to reality: Trump was not winning the battle over the shutdown in public opinion, he had not persuaded Democrats to fund the wall he wanted, and he had no plan to change that.
The unfavorable polling is not news. Since the early days of the shutdown, more Americans have blamed Trump than Democrats for the government’s closure, which is not altogether surprising since, in December, the president preemptively claimed responsibility. But over the past week, there have been signs that the shutdown has hurt Trump even with his base supporters—the voters whose favor Trump hoped to cement by shutting down the government in the first place.
Early in January, public opinion briefly moved toward Trump, but since then it has gotten ugly for him again. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday showed that voters blamed Trump and Republicans more than congressional Democrats, 54–35. In a CBS poll, seven in 10 voters said a border wall was not worth the shutdown, and respondents rated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of negotiations higher than Trump’s, 47–35. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 60 percent held Trump responsible for the shutdown, versus 31 percent who blamed Democrats.
[Read: Trump’s entire shutdown approach, encapsulated in one tweet]
For months, Trump’s overall approval rating has been an object of fascination for pundits. On the one hand, it’s terrible, hovering in the low 40s, as HuffPost Pollster’s average demonstrates. On the other hand, it has just hovered there. Almost nothing—not the steady drumbeat of damning news on the Russia investigation, not the chaos of the White House, and neither a strong economy nor a volatile stock market—seemed able to dislodge it. The American people had apparently made up their minds about Trump, and the four in 10 who approved weren’t going to change their minds, come hell or high water.
Yet the shutdown seems to have broken that equilibrium. Trump hit his highest disapproval on record in the Morning Consult poll, at 57 percent. CBS found 59 percent disapproval. In the AP-NORC poll, Trump’s approval tanked from 42 percent a month ago to 34 percent. The president was even down in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll he flogged on Twitter. FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator shows a clear downward trend since the start of the shutdown, with Trump’s approval heading toward depths not seen since his disastrous December 2017 and the aftermath of a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
What’s interesting is not just that the approval rate is finally budging, but why—and with whom. Trump has long been happy to withstand the opprobrium of the press, elites, and much of the country. As my colleague Ron Brownstein has demonstrated, the president has opted for political tactics meant to shore up his base. This is strategically dubious—it’s hard to win reelection with 40 percent of the country—but it has been consistent. It has shown some success, too. While Trump’s overall approval is low, his standing among Republicans has remained very strong.
Shutting down the government over the wall was a part of that philosophy. The administration concluded that the wall was such an important issue for his base that it was worth whatever political blowback that might come from other quarters to get it done. As Ann Coulter, who effectively shamed him into the shutdown in December, recently put it, “He is dead in the water if he doesn’t build that wall. Dead, dead, dead.”
In practice, however, weakened standing among that base accounts for Trump’s slumping approval. The NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll finds that Trump’s approval is down among suburban men, white evangelicals, and men without a college degree, all key segments of his constituency. And while 83 percent of Republicans in that poll still support him, his net approval has slipped 10 points.
[Read: Why hasn’t Trump folded?]
In the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump’s disapproval increased among evangelicals, non-college-educated voters, and those who voted for Trump in 2016, compared with a poll in early January. Meanwhile, the number who blamed Trump for the shutdown increased (slightly) among all three groups.
Interestingly, support among all three demographics in the Politico/Morning Consult poll for the wall has remained essentially constant. They haven’t changed their minds about the need for the wall; they’re just losing their faith in Trump and are fed up with the shutdown.
Nevertheless, the slippage in backing even among Trump’s base since the start of the shutdown calls into question the wisdom of the president’s calculation that the wall was an effective pander to his core supporters. It’s not just that Trump’s belief that Democrats would cave was out of touch with reality—even more dangerously for him, he was out of touch with the base.
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