december 1906

Less than a week after her contentious outburst went viral, a Georgia principal has been fired from her post. The incident marks the latest high-profile and racially charged controversy to shake up the education world. Nancy Gordeuk is the founder and former principal of the TNT Academy—a private secondary school that offers “non-traditional” education and independent-study opportunities to capture “the needs of public school students that are bored in a classroom and are starting to get into trouble,” its website says. She became infamous last weekend after a video featuring her speech and subsequent comments at the academy’s graduation ceremony spread across the Internet.

President Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments at which she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked video of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Donald Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.

The declassification process will be selective, of course, in service to a predetermined narrative. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are fiercely battling in court to suppress congressional subpoenas for the financial documents that would cast light on Trump’s pre-2016 finances.

Who will trust or credit in any way the integrity of a Barr-led investigation? The intelligence agencies found evidence that alarmed them enough about the campaign’s Russia connections to justify a request for warrants. A federal court reviewed that evidence and authorized and reauthorized it. Will that evidence be declassified?

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.  

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

Do you remember the little woven finger traps you sometimes got as a kid, as a party favor or a reward at a fair? You could comfortably stick your fingers in, but if you tried to pull them out, the weave would tighten and you’d be stuck. Only by maneuvering gently, and not pulling too hard, could you extract yourself.

President Donald Trump finds himself in a sort of impeachment finger trap right now. He isn’t certain to be impeached—but every step he’s taking to try to squirm out of it seems to tighten the bind he’s in.

Consider the president’s tantrum on Wednesday. After inviting Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to the White House for a meeting on infrastructure, Trump stomped out of the meeting, supposedly because Pelosi had earlier accused him of participating in a cover-up. (The accusation is unrebuttably true.) Trump insists he did not throw a fit—“I was purposely very polite and calm, much as I was minutes later with the press in the Rose Garden. Can be easily proven.”—but one can’t calmly blow off a meeting. It defeats the point.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

Yesterday in Jakarta, after it was announced that incumbent President Joko Widodo had been reelected as president of Indonesia, beating former General Prabowo Subianto by 11 percentage points, Subianto’s supporters took to the streets. Protesters made claims of widespread cheating, and clashed with riot police in several locations in Jakarta, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. Police reportedly responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting hundreds. After 24 hours of chaos, six people were reported to have died in the protests—the cause of their deaths are under investigation—and more than 200 were listed as injured. Subianto says he plans to contest the election results in court.

It all started with a question, one my parents had been unable to answer for 70 years.

What happened to the French doctor they had taken in during the Russian siege of Budapest? He was an escaped prisoner of war. They were just trying to hang on. Together, they hid in a cellar, beneath the feet of German soldiers who had made the home their headquarters.

My parents’ recollections of those times surfaced only rarely. But when they talked about the winter of 1944–1945,  everything seemed more vivid. It was like their memories of the flare of the bombs lit up their lives. As a couple, that time was their beginning. When my father, who had deserted from the Hungarian Army, and my mother, who had refused to move to the ghetto and wear the yellow star, cast their lot together.

Updated at 10:14 a.m. ET on May 23, 2019.

Four years ago, I wrote a letter to John Walker Lindh, then–inmate number 45426-083 in the Terre Haute penitentiary, to ask for advice about jihadism, Islamic law, and the Islamic State. Lindh is the most famous jihadist America has ever produced. In December 2001, he was pulled, half-dead, from a cellar full of fellow al-Qaeda fighters in northern Afghanistan, and 10 months later he was sentenced to 20 years in U.S. prison for terror-related crimes. He is scheduled to be freed today, with three years off for good behavior, and many—including Donald Trump—have objected to his release.

The story of our correspondence is in my book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State, but some details appear here for the first time.

SEOUL, South Korea—“If the United States believes that it doesn’t need an alliance with the Republic of Korea, I would say it’s okay. If the United States doesn’t want the alliance, we don’t have to beg for it.”

It was a stunning statement to hear in Seoul from one of South Korea’s highest-ranking officials, considering it was in regard to a nearly 70-year partnership forged by American and Korean soldiers who fought and died together during the Korean War. And it was a sign that well beyond South Korea, the United States’ system of alliances is buckling under pressure from President Donald Trump’s campaign to renegotiate the terms of America’s involvement with the world—to turn what used to be a basic tenet of U.S. grand strategy into a blunt question of financial grand totals. Seated in his ornate chambers in April, the speaker of the National Assembly, Moon Hee-sang, was answering my question about Trump’s demand for South Korea to shell out more money to keep American troops in the country, and his threats to impose tariffs on South Korean goods.

Barack Obama is literally more popular than Jesus among Democrats. Unfortunately, neither the former president nor any of the party’s 23 candidates currently seeking the 2020 nomination know quite what to do with that information.

Of course, before any serious endorsement conversation can commence, Obama has to finish his book (between rounds of golf and raising millions for his foundation). The writing has been going more slowly than he’d expected, and according to several people who have spoken with him, the 44th president is feeling competitive with his wife, whose own book, Becoming, was the biggest release of 2018 and is on track to be the best-selling memoir in history. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others in this story, these sources note he’ll occasionally point out in conversation that he’s writing this book himself, while Michelle used a ghostwriter. He’s also trying to balance the historical and political needs of a project that will be up to his standards as a writer, and not 1,000 pages long. Obama’s research process has been intense and convoluted, and it’s still very much ongoing, from the legal pads he had shipped to Marlon Brando’s old island in French Polynesia, where he spent a month in March 2017, to the interviews that aides have been conducting with former members of his administration to jog and build out memories.