november 1889

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise. It was good flying weather—temperatures in the mid-40s with a slight breeze out of the southeast—but oddly, no one knew where the 737 jetliner was headed. The crew had prepared three flight plans: one to Denver. One to Dallas. And one to Chicago.

In the plane’s trailing vortices was greater Seattle, where the company’s famed engineering culture had taken root; where the bulk of its 40,000-plus engineers lived and worked; indeed, where the jet itself had been assembled. But it was May 2001. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

At the start of the second session of today’s doubleheader impeachment hearings, Chairman Adam Schiff noted an important distinction about the two witnesses appearing before the House Intelligence Committee: Both Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Timothy Morrison, a senior director on the National Security Council, were “requested by the minority.”

In other words, the Republicans on the committee wanted them there. And, presumably, they wanted Volker and Morrison because they thought their testimony would help President Donald Trump and hurt the case for his impeachment.

That’s not exactly what happened.

In his opening statement, Volker made a point of defending the potential political opponent Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate, former Vice President Joe Biden, calling him “an honorable man” whom he holds in “the highest regard.” Volker referred to allegations about Biden’s involvement with Ukraine during the waning months of the Obama administration as “conspiracy theories” and said the suggestion that Biden had acted corruptly was “not credible.” Volker insisted that he did not make a connection at the time between Biden and Trump’s desire for Ukraine to investigate both possible interference in the 2016 election and the energy company Burisma, on whose board Biden’s son once sat. But Volker testified that he now understood that the president’s demands of Ukraine went beyond a generalized crackdown on corruption—that he wanted a probe of the Bidens, something Volker said this afternoon was “unacceptable.”

That old sinking feeling is back.

There have occasionally been stretches of time that are good for the Trump administration. There have more often been stretches that are bad, though there is a baseline of chaos that has come to feel almost normal. And occasionally, there have been truly hellacious stretches: May 2017, when Donald Trump fired then–FBI Director James Comey; August 2017, around the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia; January 2018, around the release of Fire and Fury; December 2018–January 2019, when Defense Secretary James Mattis quit and Trump forced and then blinked on a government shutdown.

Now the administration is experiencing another one of those stretches. Even by the strained standards of the Trump presidency, the past couple of weeks have brought an astonishing raft of bad news for the White House.

The radical French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat died, famously, in a bathtub. He was soaking in one when his assassin, Charlotte Corday, plunged a kitchen knife into his chest in 1793. And he was soaking in a bath because of a mysterious condition that left his skin intensely itchy and blistered. The bath was his only relief, and the bath was where he died.

In the centuries since, people have speculated endlessly about the origins of his skin condition. Marat himself blamed the time he spent hiding from his political enemies, sleeping in cellars in damp, dirty clothes. Doctors have speculated about conditions with ever more complicated names: syphilis, scrofula, scabies, leprosy, diabetic candidiasis, atopic eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, dermatitis herpetiformis, bullous pemphigoid, and histiocytic proliferative disorder. Recently, geneticists decided to look at the only physical evidence that remains: the bloodstained newspapers he was annotating at the time he was killed.