Tax Collapse

Biting the Hand That Fed Him

Ron Fournier

The Republican nominee long used the media to project his fairy tale self-image but now blames the industry for his flailing campaign.

Long addicted to media attention, Donald Trump is like strung-out junkie, blaming heroin for his fall.

He will never recover, because he will never fault himself.

The self-professed billionaire and serial bankruptcy filer built his career on a singular strength: an ability to manipulate the media to project his fairy tale self-image. Never as rich or as smart or as powerful or as respected or (God forbid) as sexual as he projected himself to be, Trump now bashes the industry that made him rather than face the truth.

Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, his strength becomes his undoing.

"If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%," Trump said Sunday in one of seven anti-media tweets.

Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting

Angelica Jade Bastién

Jared Leto’s turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become more about ego and marketing than good performances.

Of all the stories surfacing about the new DC Comics film Suicide Squad—from the dismal reviews to the box-office reports—the most disconcerting are the ones that detail how Jared Leto got into his role as the Joker. Leto was reportedly so committed to the part that he gifted the cast and crew with a litany of horrible items: used condoms, a dead pig, a live rat. To get into the character’s twisted mindset, he also watched footage of brutal crimes online. “The Joker is incredibly comfortable with acts of violence,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was watching real violence, consuming that. There’s a lot you can learn from seeing it.”

Watching Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity.

Donald Trump Thinks America Was Too Nice to Iraq

Russell Berman

The Republican nominee says the U.S. needs to be tougher—on its enemies, immigrants, and the nations it invades.

If Donald Trump had been president 13 years ago, he insists now, the United States would never have invaded Iraq. But if he had launched the war—and mind you, he would not have, even though he supported it at the time—the U.S. would have lost a lot less blood and won a lot more treasure.

“We should have kept the oil,” Trump said during the middle of a 48-minute speech on radical Islam and national security that he delivered Monday afternoon in Youngstown, Ohio.

This might seem like a minor aside coming from Trump, a provocative little I-told-you-so from a man who loves to tell you so. The fateful Iraq decision happened so long ago now: Why would the Republican nominee want to muddle a key distinction between himself and Hillary Clinton that, at least according to his revisionist history, works in his favor? But Trump’s point about the oil was an important—so much so that he repeated it three more times. “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen. I said: Keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil,” Trump recalled. “Don’t let someone else get it.”

The Leak Prosecution That Lost the Space Race

Ian MacDougall

He was the first whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act—and his trial set the pattern for how the government treats unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Jack Nickerson watched the papers burn. It was the afternoon of January 2, 1957, and an overnight cold snap had descended on northern Alabama, pushing daytime temperatures to near freezing. His neighbors would think nothing of the smoke wafting from the chimney of the large antebellum colonial he shared with his wife and four children. There weren’t all that many neighbors anyway. The house sat on an isolated corner of Redstone Arsenal, a sprawling Army base in Huntsville. A reservoir surrounded it on three sides.

Nickerson, a colonel, had good reason to avoid attention. For the past three hours, he had scoured his office and home for copies of the documents that now sat stacked next to the fireplace, growing shorter by the minute. The word “SECRET” crumpled and blackened before being consumed by the flames.

Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump?

Peter Beinart

A few themes emerge among intellectuals on the right about what attracts them to the candidate: his campaign’s energy, his impassioned following, and his eagerness to call out the establishment.

Logically, Donald Trump should have less support among intellectuals than he had a year ago. That’s because over the past year, he has made statements that expose him as both ignorant of public policy and contemptuous of liberal-democratic norms. He has proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, incited violence against protesters at his rallies, responded to The Washington Post’s critical coverage by warning that its owner is “getting away with murder” on his taxes and “we can’t let him get away with it,” declared a federal judge biased because he’s Mexican American, and twice revealed his unfamiliarity with the term nuclear triad.

Instead, more than a year after Trump announced his presidential bid, his support among intellectuals has grown. Of course, many prominent conservatives—from George Will to William Kristol to David Brooks to Erick Erickson—oppose him militantly. But another cluster of writers and thinkers have declared themselves supportive of, or at least open to supporting, Trump. Among Trump’s critics, the predominant explanation for this openness is opportunism: Supporting the Republican nominee can have professional benefits. But a deeper dynamic is at work. It’s just hard to recognize, because American intellectuals haven’t felt the allure of authoritarian, illiberal politics this strongly in a long time.

Cars on a large elevator as seen in a Chevrolet commercial — Chevrolet

The Reality of Those 'Real People, Not Actors' Ads

Spencer Kornhaber

Chevrolet’s marketing campaign is the culmination of a truthiness-in-advertising trend.

During commercial breaks at the Olympics viewing parties I’ve been at in the past week, one company’s ads have consistently sent the room into a round of existential questions. What is reality? Aren’t we all actors? Just how excited can a normal person get about J.D. Power awards?

In Chevrolet’s “Real People, Not Actors” ads, focus-groups participants react enthusiastically to information about automobiles. Sometimes, this is accomplished with a high-concept trick, like when the moderator pretended to destroy the group’s cell phones to show the importance of having a ride with wi-fi. At other times the pitch is more straightforward, like with the spots running frequently during the Olympics that emphasize the accolades Chevrolet has earned. “Thanks for blowing our minds,” one participant says, and it’s not clear whether she’s referring to Chevy’s award-winning dependability or the enormous elevator that’s been hoisting cars into the air in front of her.

The Burden of Being Asian American on Campus

Julia Wang

The arrival of Chinese international students comes at a cost to some.

When my father was a graduate student at Loyola University in Chicago, two distinct things marked his day: the “L” and instant noodles. It was 1998 in a studio apartment in Rogers Park below the Red Line. Every night, the sounds of the train woke him up. Every morning, he got up after a restless night and made himself some ramen. After those three years, he never wanted to look at instant noodles again.

At that time, it was almost unheard of for Chinese students to go to the United States for undergraduate study. Instead, everyone suffered through the dreaded gaokao, the Chinese college-entrance examination. For four consecutive days in June, thousands of Chinese high schoolers sat in stuffy classrooms with no air conditioning, sweating and exerting themselves in subjects like mathematics, physics, and English to get one single score high enough to earn a coveted spot at a top university. Most students who did go abroad were graduate students, and many of them stayed in the new country.

Donald Trump's Intolerance for Intolerance

David A. Graham

The latest iteration of his immigration ban would allow only those who “embrace a tolerant American society” to enter the country.

In Mario Cuomo’s famous phrase, leaders campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But as Donald Trump is finding, sometimes the gap is larger still—more like translating across languages.

Take one of Trump’s central policy planks since last fall: excluding people who might pose a risk of terrorism from entering the United States. The Republican nominee has run through a range of different versions of the policy, working to transform an idea that resonated strongly with his voters during the Republican primary into a workable proposal—so far, with minimal success. His latest swing, proposing an unusual ideological test, is part of a foreign-policy speech Trump delivered in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday.

Will Donald Trump Permanently Alienate Republican Women?

Clare Foran

His campaign may fail because of its lack of appeal among female voters. That could affect the party long after 2016.

A clueless woman looking for attention. Prissy and confused little girl. Not pretty enough to be a Trump girl. Meghan Milloy has been called all of that because she’s a Republican woman who plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. For standing against Donald Trump, she’s faced an onslaught of criticism on social media—and a lot of it has been sexist. “People have been coming out of the woodwork, calling me every name in the book,” Milloy said in an interview.

Trump is famous for insulting women. He rates and ranks women based on the way they look, so much so that entire articles have been devoted to chronicling his sexist comments. As Milloy has discovered, some of his fans seem to act and talk in similar ways.

'Trumpism' and the Rift Between Belief and Truth

Peter Beinart

To some conservatives, “real Americans” and “ordinary folks” are getting a raw deal. But just because it seems that way doesn’t make it so.

The number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support Donald Trump is relatively small. But the number of high-profile conservative commentators who enthusiastically support “Trumpism” is higher. Trumpism is the belief that Trump’s followers constitute the “real America” and that anyone who does not validate their grievances is an elitist who neither understands nor cares about ordinary folks.

Few columnists have embraced Trumpism more fervently than The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan. In her writing, Noonan rarely cites interviews with actual Trump supporters or polls about what they actually believe. Nonetheless, she regularly speaks on their behalf. “Trump supporters have a more grounded sense of America and its problems” than do GOP elites, she wrote in June. “What Trump supporters believe, what they perceive as they watch him, is that he is on America’s side,” she declared in April. “And that comes as a great relief to them, because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world.”