European Council President Donald Tusk discusses Brexit in Valletta, Malta, on March 31.
Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters
—The EU’s draft on Brexit talks propose a “phased approach,” suggesting talks on a trade deal with the U.K. can begin once there’s enough progress on a financial settlement.
—Mike Flynn offers to be interviewed in exchange for immunity from prosecution, the Wall Street Journal and other are reporting. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
President Trump signed two executive orders on Friday, aimed at assessing the fairness of U.S. trade deals. The move represents a more cautious approach from when Trump, as presidential candidate, promised to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he called “the worst trade deal ever.” The first order Trump signed calls for a 90-day study to look country-by-country, product-by-product, at abuses that contribute to the U.S. trade deficit. The study would serve as a template for rule- and decision-making when the administration evaluates how to reorganize trade deals. The second order will step up duties collected from countries the U.S. finds to be dumping products at below production costs, often done with heavy subsidies from their governments. The orders come a week ahead of Trump’s meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, which Trump has accused of taking advantage of the U.S. Trump has called the U.S. trade deficit—more than $500 billion last year—a job-killer, and has said he will renegotiate deals like NAFTA to put American interests first. But more so than trade deals, economists have pointed to the increased robotization of factories as the major cause for lost factory jobs. At the signing ceremony Friday, after taking a few questions from the media, Trump abruptly left without actually signing the order. Vice President Mike Pence instead picked up the document and chased after the president.
The meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits...
New York Mayor De Blasio Plans to Close Rikers Island Jail Within 10 Years
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday plans to shutter the Rikers Island jail complex within the next decade in a bid to end the era of mass incarceration in the city.
Rikers Island is an expression of a national problem. The mass incarceration era did not begin in New York City but it’s going to end here.
Closing the 85-year-old facility will be a “long and arduous” process, de Blasio said in a statement, adding “our success in reducing crime and reforming our criminal justice system has paved a path off Rikers Island and toward community-based facilities capable of meeting our criminal justice goals.” De Blasio said the project would require cutting the jail’s nearly 10,000-person population in half, as well as constructing several smaller facilities to replace it. The announcement follows the formation last year of an independent panel commissioned to examine the facility, which, as The New York Times reports, recommended the jail be demolished and replaced with new jails built in each of the city’s five boroughs. More details from the commissions findings are expected to be announced Sunday.
A Federal Judge Approves a $25 Million Trump University Settlement
Carlos Barria / Reuters
A federal judge on Friday approved a deal for President Trump to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits against him over Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by Trump. The ruling, by U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel in the Southern District of California, ends seven years of legal battles, with class-action suits in New York and California. The cases came to national attention during Trump’s election campaign, with plaintiffs saying they’d signed up to learn Trump’s real-estate investment secrets, but instead forked out thousands of dollars for worthless information that could be found free online. Trump had refused to settle the suits, and even promised to reopen the university once he won the court battle. At one point, he complained that Curiel could not possibly oversee the case impartially, because of the Indiana-born judge’s Mexican heritage. Trump later apologized for this comment, reversed his stance on the lawsuit, and after he won the election in November agreed to settle for $25 million. That figure comes to about 90 percent of the money his university took from customers. Not everyone is happy, and there were two plaintiffs who objected to the settlement, one on the grounds that Trump owed them an apology.
Germany Says NATO's Spending Target Neither 'Reachable nor Desirable'
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on March 31, 2017. (Virginia Mayo / Reuters)
Germany called the 2-percent spending goal for all NATO allies neither “reachable nor desirable” Friday in response to repeated calls by the U.S. for members of the military alliance to meet their financial commitments. “Two percent would mean military expenses of some 70 billion euros,” Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s foreign minister, said at a NATO meeting in Brussels, where U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in attendance. “I don’t know any German politician who would claim that is reachable nor desirable.” His remarks follow repeated demands by the U.S. that NATO members fulfill their treaty obligations and contribute 2 percent of their gross domestic product to defense spending by 2024—a goal that five of the NATO’s 28 members have met. Germany spends about 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense. Tillerson said Friday all allies should by May “either met the pledge guidelines or will have developed plans that clearly articulate how … the pledge will be fulfilled.” He also reaffirmed the U.S. government’s commitment to the alliance—one which President Trump has previously criticized as “obsolete,” having at one point appeared to suggest that U.S. commitment to the body should be predicated upon its members’s defense spending. But Trump reaffirmed his “strong support for NATO” this month during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also reaffirmed support for NATO and Germany’s commitment to the the 2 percent spending target. She said: “Last year we increased our defense spending by 8 percent, and we’re going to work together again and again on this.”
The Wall Street Journal and others reported last night that Mike Flynn, President Trump’s national-security adviser, old the FBI and congressional investigators he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for immunity from prosecution. As Matt Ford wrote: “Why does someone request immunity from prosecution before speaking with federal investigators? That question will likely consume Washington in the weeks ahead after Thursday night’s bombshell...” Robert Kelner, Flynn’s attorney, said: “General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.” But The New York Times cited an unnamed congressional official as saying investigators are not willing to broker a deal “until they are further along in their inquiries and they better understand what information Mr. Flynn might offer as part of a deal.” But as Matt wrote last night: “A request for immunity isn’t an admission of guilt or wrongdoing. It may be sought by witnesses who fear that their words could be used against them, as a condition of their testimony. … But the move could also be a purely prophylactic measure.”
The European Union is suggesting a “phased approach” to Brexit in which it will discuss a trade deal with the U.K. only when there’s sufficient progress made on the nature of their separation. The EU’s draft plan, which was released today in Brussels, must now be approved by the bloc’s 27 other members (the U.K. remain the 28th member until its separation from the EU is final; the process is expected to take at least two years). The release of the plan comes two days after the U.K. invoked Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the process by which Brexit negotiations formally begin. The U.K. wants talks on its exit and trade relations to be discussed simultaneously. Donald Tusk, the European Council president, said in Malta that “will not happen.” “Only once we have achieved sufficient progress on the withdrawal can we discuss the framework for our future relationship,” he said.
The circus in the Rose Garden threatened to distract from what the president actually did on Friday.
After failing for two years to persuade Congress to fund a wall on the southern border, President Donald Trump on Friday said he will declare a national emergency and reallocate some $8 billion to build the wall through executive fiat.
Trump announced the move in a rambling, free-associative appearance in the White House Rose Garden that was more MAGA rally than presidential announcement. Even by the standards of this president, his remarks were confusing, untruthful, and often off topic, with strange ad-hominem attacks on other politicians and sharp exchanges with reporters. Despite claiming that the nation faces an acute crisis that requires immediate attention, the president meandered through a long preamble about trade deals and North Korea. When he finally got to the point, he struggled to stay focused.
Trump’s emergency declaration is going to run into four hurdles.
President Donald Trump’s declaration of emergency salved yesterday’s loss of face—but has not solved any real problems for this administration or the country. In fact, Trump has opened four new problems atop the original problem with which he has flailed.
The original problem is that a border wall was Trump’s signature promise, backed by his guarantee—“Believe me!”—that Mexico would pay for it. Trump has successfully induced his supporters to shrug off the abandonment of his promise that “Mexico will pay for the wall,” which is an impressive hustle already. He might well have induced them to forget the wall, or to accept that a light upgrade of the existing 700 miles of fencing counted as “the wall.” By now, his supporters are much more invested in the idea of Trump as a success than in his achieving any success in particular.
Still, Trump has to imagine that in 2020 some political opponent will drive to an unfenced part of the U.S.-Mexico border with a camera crew, walk back and forth across it, and make a mocking campaign commercial asking: Whatever happened to the wall?
In long, rambling remarks, the president announced that he’s reprogramming billions of dollars to fund a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Donald Trump announced Friday morning that he’s declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and will be reprogramming billions in federal funds to build a wall.
Below, the full text of his remarks from the White House Rose Garden before he took questions from reporters.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Before we begin, I would like to say that we have a large team of very talented people in China. We have had a negotiation going on for about two days. It’s going extremely well—who knows what that means because it only matters if we get it done, but we are very much working very closely with China and President Xi who I respect a lot, very good relationship that we have. And we are a lot closer than we ever were in this country with having a real trade deal.
With his national-emergency declaration, Trump has crossed the Rubicon.
The president seems to think he’s found a way out of the crisis. No, not the “crisis” at the border—if the word still has any universally accepted definition, there is no crisis at the border.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2018’s apprehensions along the southwestern border were the fifth lowest in nearly half a century. Last year’s records show modest growth from 2017, when apprehensions were lower than at any point since 1972. The administration notes an increase in the number of family units and unaccompanied minors crossing the border from Guatemala and Honduras. But the number of border-crossing families and children originating from Mexico and El Salvador has declined precipitously since 2016, and more juveniles crossed the border into the hands of patrol agents under George W. Bush. His administration coped with that influx despite having fewer available resources.
The choice was unusual, but loving: We wanted them to live without the shadow of their mother's mortality hanging over them.
We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.
They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.
Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wasn’t very good with women, monosyllabic in their presence. We all went to a bar after one game, and I came home with a napkin on which I’d jotted down words to describe Marla: “Hot. Fast. Fun. Sweet. Flint.” Yes, flint as in Flint, Michigan—her hometown—but also flint as in flinty—steely, speedy, mighty, glinting.
A month later, I mustered the nerve to call her house phone (we only had landlines in 1987). We would spend the next 31 years together.
Marla could water-ski barefoot. I was a rabbi’s kid; I rarely even went on boats. She made a habit of taking me places.
If you had asked me on our wedding day, I would have told you with confidence what our love would look like: We’d be a couple who jogged together in Scarsdale, danced in Nantucket together, carved through snow or lakes on skis together, spun the Hanukkah dreidel together with our children, and sang along together to Bruce Springsteen (her prescient favorite was “Tougher Than the Rest”). I would not have said we’d be a couple who fought a fatal illness together. Nor that this private act would be the thing that united us the most.
In 2009, Marla’s radiologist called to tell her that she had early-stage breast cancer. She was also BRCA-positive, meaning that she carried the inherited gene for the disease—a troublesome marker. After a double mastectomy and ovary removal, she needed eight rounds of chemotherapy to clear the cancer found in her lymph nodes.
Our kids were 8, 9, and 11 at the time, and though they understood then that she was undergoing treatment (wigs were hard to hide), we never told them the news we soon learned from Memorial Sloan Kettering’s head of breast-cancer oncology: Marla had a triple-negative cancer cell, the fiercest of them all. When linked with the BRCA mutation, it is commonly referred to as “the breast-cancer death sentence.” This specialist bluntly told her: “Go live your next 1,000 days in the best way you know how.”
Women, more than men, tend to feel stultified by long-term exclusivity—despite having been taught that they were designed for it.
Andrew Gotzis, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple, whom we’ll call Jane and John, for several years. They have sex about three times a week, which might strike many as enviable, considering that John and Jane—who are in their 40s—have been together for nearly two decades. Based on numbers alone, one might wonder why they need couples counseling at all.
But only one of them is happy with the state of play. And it isn’t Jane.
“The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Or frequency. It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.” John, meanwhile, feels criticized and inadequate. Mostly he can’t understand why, if his wife is having sex with him and having orgasms, she wants more. Or different.
What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world
Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital.
On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet, the victim of a cat attack. The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than 7 came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.
From seizing control of the internet to declaring martial law, President Trump may legally do all kinds of extraordinary things.
In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, President Donald Trump reached deep into his arsenal to try to deliver votes to Republicans.
Most of his weapons were rhetorical, featuring a mix of lies and false inducements—claims that every congressional Democrat had signed on to an “open borders” bill (none had), that liberals were fomenting violent “mobs” (they weren’t), that a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class would somehow pass while Congress was out of session (it didn’t). But a few involved the aggressive use—and threatened misuse—of presidential authority: He sent thousands of active-duty soldiers to the southern border to terrorize a distant caravan of desperate Central American migrants, announced plans to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive order, and tweeted that law enforcement had been “strongly notified” to be on the lookout for “ILLEGAL VOTING.”
The president steps over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he encounters them. Everyone in America saw it when he fired my boss. But I saw it firsthand time and time again.
On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI, I sat down with senior staff involved in the Russia case—the investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. I had spoken with him the night before, in the Oval Office, when he told me he had fired James Comey.
A call like this was highly unusual. Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. There should be no direct contact between the president and the director, except for national-security purposes. The reason is simple. Investigations and prosecutions need to be pursued without a hint of suspicion that someone who wields power has put a thumb on the scale.
“You need a bowl or a whisk, and one of your baking friends will get it for you. You know those trenches in the war? It’s kind of like that.”
Every week, The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.
This week she talks with two former contestants on the U.K. reality show The Great British Bake Off (known in the U.S. as The Great British Baking Show) who forged an intergenerational friendship during the competition. They discuss the shared love of motorcycles that brought them together, the games they played during downtime on set, and how they stay close with each other as well as all the other bakers from their season.
The Friends:
Selasi Gbormittah, 33, a banker who lives in London Val Stones, 68, a (semi) retired teacher who lives in Somerset
