Vice President Pence, President Trump, and Defense Secretary James Mattis at the executive order signing
Carlos Barria / Reuters
—President Trump signed an executive order that among things suspends the U.S. refugee program for 120 days and bars all Syrian refugees until further notice. More here
—British Prime Minister Theresa May became the first foreign leader to meet with President Trump at the White House. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Trump Signs Executive Order Suspending U.S. Refugee Intake
Defense Secretary James Mattis greets President Trump at the Pentagon on Friday. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)
President Trump signed an executive order Friday that among things suspends the U.S. refugee program for 120 days and bars all Syrian refugees until further notice—an expected move that comes on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which honors the millions of victims of Nazi genocide, including the tens of thousands of Jews who were denied asylum in the U.S. at the time.
The move explicitly appears to target Muslims refugees—though the White House has shied way from calling it a Muslim ban, as Trump had done during the presidential campaign. But in an interview with CBN’s Brody Files, Trump said persecuted Christians will be given a priority over others. The executive order also appears to suspend immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, with some exceptions. The secretary of Homeland Security will submit a report of countries within 30 days.
Officials have previously said the Trump administration will suspend the issuance of visas from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The seven countries account for an insignificant number of people entering the U.S.—though they account for about 40 percent of the U.S. refugee intake. Refugee and human rights groups have sharply criticized the move.
UPDATE: Theresa May Meets Trump at the White House
(Mark Makela / Reuters)
British Prime Minister Theresa May became the first foreign leader to meet with President Trump at the White House. The two leaders are expected Friday to discuss, among other things, a trade deal, NATO, and Russia. Trump has said he’ll negotiate directly with May over a trade deal, which the U.K. needs following its vote last summer to withdraw from the European Union. Statements from both London and Brussels in recent days suggest the process of withdrawing from the EU is likely to be anything but smooth; a trade deal the U.S. would boost May’s credentials at home ahead of an expected parliamentary vote on Brexit. Both countries remain members of NATO, and while May has called the Atlantic alliance invaluable, Trump has described it as “obsolete.” As for Russia, which Trump has said he wants to work with, May, perhaps paraphrasing a former U.S. president, said: “My advice is to engage but beware.”
Al-Shabaab Attacks a Kenyan Military Base and Kills Dozens
Feisal Omar / Reuters
The militant Islamist group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for an attack on a military base Friday that reportedly killed dozens of Kenyan soldiers. A spokesman for Kenya’s military said the terrorist group had used vehicles laden with explosives to gain access to the base, located in the southern town of Kulbiyow, which is on the border of Kenya and Somalia, then raided it with their fighters. A spokesman for al-Shabaab told Reuters its fighters killed at least 66 soldiers at the base, who were deployed with a regional peacekeeping mission. These numbers have not been confirmed by the Kenyan government, and al-Shabaab’s death tolls typically differ from official counts. The militant group has waged a war in the region near Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia for more than a decade. Recently, as the African Union’s security forces clamp down on the terrorists, they have stuck back with more violence. This week alone, al-Shabaab claimed credit for an attack on a hotel in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, that killed 28 people.
President Trump is expected Friday to urge defense officials to devise a plan in 30 days to defeat ISIS. The plan, according to The New York Times, could include “American artillery on the ground in Syria and Army attack helicopters to support an assault on the group’s capital, Raqqa.” Trump makes his first visit to the Pentagon today. On Thursday, Trump renewed his calls for a wall on the southern border with Mexico and addressed Republican lawmakers at their annual retreat.
The president is supposed to protect and defend the nation’s supreme laws. Shooting looters is unconstitutional.
Overnight, protests of the egregious police killing of George Floyd roiled several American cities, including Minneapolis, where riots and looting frightened locals and destroyed livelihoods.
A prudent president would have urged calm.
On Twitter, President Donald Trump instead aggressively insulted elected officials in Minneapolis. “A total lack of leadership,” he wrote. “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”
Then Trump threatened to unleash American carnage on looters. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he declared in a second tweet. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
President Trump calls the cops on those who challenge him, even if there’s no actual violation, to make life miserable for them.
The United States feels like a nation of Karens these days, so it’s only appropriate that the president would be the Karen in chief.
A Karen, if you’ve somehow missed the memo, is the type of person who demands to see the manager or calls the cops, like the dog owner who summoned the NYPD to Central Park after an African American man asked her to leash her dog. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes, “They’re obsessed with banal consumer trendsand their personal appearance, and typically criminally misguided, usually loudly and with extreme confidence.”
The term is most commonly applied to middle-aged women—but why abide by that sexist standard? A man can easily be a Karen, as Donald Trump is proving this week. When Trump gets sufficiently angry about anyone who dares criticize him, he is quick to work the referees, attempting to use the force of the law to bully the critics into submission and to try to intimidate would-be critics from opening their mouths. That’s what Trump is doing in resurfacing old and spurious accusations of murder against the TV host Joe Scarborough, and in preparing an executive order to punish social-media companies after Twitter dared to fact-check his words.
Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has a powerful backer and an array of experiences that complement Biden’s.
Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on May 29, 2020
Joe Biden’s concern about the national-security impact of the coronavirus has led him to weigh picking the Obama-administration national security adviser Susan Rice as his running mate, according to several people who’ve spoken privately with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in recent weeks.
Rice is well known in Washington, but has a much lower national profile than most of the other women being considered, and comes with few conventional political upsides. She isn’t particularly likely to be selected, people inside the campaign say (some who have spoken about her with Biden see her as a more likely pick for secretary of defense or secretary of state), and Rice has told confidants that she knows that.
The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.
Six weeks ago, Ahmaud Arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.
Quarantine reminded us that we could work out anywhere. But “anywhere” is not a place we go to do important things.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.
It’s Day One of the reopened future, and as people have always done when it’s time for a new start, you head to the gym. Well, hold on. We should begin before Day One, because you’ll actually have booked this time slot the week before. It’s good for 90 minutes. Don’t be late.
You grab a door handle wrapped in germ-repelling vinyl and walk inside. A Bluetooth-enabled beacon at the front desk recognizes your phone and checks you in. The receptionist takes your temperature and hands you a towel, plus a colored wristband that’ll help the staff remind you when it’s time to go. Hopefully you brought some water with you, because touchless bottle fillers have replaced the drinking fountains.
The president is attempting to bring social-media platforms into his authoritarian infrastructure—or otherwise censor them.
Sarah Palin knew her rights had been violated.
Just days before the 2008 election, the Republican vice-presidential nominee told a conservative radio host that the press was trampling on her right to free speech.
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin said, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
Palin’s remarks were widely ridiculed at the time. The First Amendment, commentators on the right and the left pointed out, protects the freedom of speech, not the freedom from criticism. You have the right to speak, and others have the right to praise, mock, or ignore you as they see fit.
Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?
So many mysteries surround Donald Trump: the contents of his tax returns, the apparent miracle of his graduation from college. Some of them are merely curiosities; others are of national importance, such as whether he understood the nuclear-weapons briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on this question.
But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
These films, each unforgettable in its own way, are essential viewing.
The word unique has to be one of the most overused descriptors in show business; if every movie that got touted as one-of-a-kind by its marketing team actually was, there’d be no further complaints about Hollywood creativity. But every once in a while, I’ll have a cinematic experience that feels genuinely unprecedented, when a work plays with the medium and its modes of storytelling in ways I didn’t think possible. The 30 movies I’ve gathered below—all of which are available to watch online—are singular, whether they’re experimental documentaries, visionary works of animation, or labyrinthine epics. Each is unforgettable, and a reminder of cinema’s potential to flout narrative convention, subvert visual traditions, and find new ways to express timeless themes.
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.
