december 1985

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, in late January 2016, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced to an audience in Sioux City: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

Trump, who has always been prone to fantastical overstatement, was derided at the time, but here and now—more than two and a half years later—the statement seems prescient.

You could list the scandals—from Robert Mueller’s probe to Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, from Tom Price to Scott Pruitt to Ben Carson, from Bill Shine to Ronny Jackson to Jared Kushner, from the Trump Hotel to the Trump label, from Charlottesville to Ukraine—and while it would be very long, it would not (at least in the eyes of Trump’s supporters) be disqualifying. Politically speaking, the president is standing with his guns blazing in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and he’s not losing anyone. Miraculously, Trump remains on top; so far this year, Gallup has registered an approval rating among the members of his own party ranging from 81 to 90 percent. Despite it all, those numbers have barely budged.

Much about the Trump administration has been unpredictable, surprising, even shocking. The president’s falling-out with Omarosa Manigault-Newman is not one of those things.

On Tuesday morning, the day Manigault-Newman’s new book was published, Donald Trump escalated his attacks on her, using the most vicious and dehumanizing language yet:

When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2018

Over the weekend, he’d debuted the “lowlife” insult, and on Monday called her “not smart,” lazy, and nasty.

The acrimonious end to their relationship was predictable to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Manigault-Newman’s stints on The Apprentice. So, too, is the intensely personal way the president has conducted his side of the feud—and the racially charged language he’s employed.

I have never lost a public debate more completely than I have lost the debate over judicial confirmations. For many years, across administrations of both parties, I clung to the increasingly minority view that each judicial nominee ought not be a skirmish in a larger war for the courts, that the Senate should tend to defer to the president in its exercise of the power to “advise and consent” on nominees, and that the Senate should treat nominees decently and without undue delays. I started arguing this position during the Clinton administration; I maintained it during the Bush administration; I wrote a book on the subject warning of the dangers of the erosion of norms surrounding confirmations.

In “Dinesh D’Souza and the Decline of American Conservatism,” my colleague David Frum notes a mainstay of his subject’s work: portraying racism in the United States as if it is overwhelmingly a sin of the Democratic Party, even as D’Souza, a partisan Republican, stokes the racial prejudices of his readers by playing on pernicious group stereotypes.

D’Souza’s basic formula for distortion is easy to grasp.

Abraham Lincoln and the members of Congress who fought to reconstruct the South in a manner that would guarantee the rights of freed slaves were Republicans. And the Democratic Party’s history is rife with horrific racism. D’Souza’s schtick is to selectively cite those historical truths while eliding other truths, like huge changes in the political parties across the decades, Democrats who’ve fought for civil rights, and a Republican Party history that is also rife with horrific racism, helping to explain why so few African Americans cast ballots for the GOP today.

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”

“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.

In her new book, Unhinged, set to be released on Tuesday, Omarosa Manigault-Newman charts her 15 years in the “cult” of Trumpworld, from her Apprentice days to the West Wing. She uses the word—cult—often throughout her 330-page memoir, describing its leader as “mentally impaired,” his followers as “worshipful.”

Manigault-Newman admits to being an unwitting member herself. The former reality-television star writes of knowing that her “friend and mentor,” Donald Trump, was “racial” from the start of their relationship, but not necessarily “racist”—a distinction she can’t quite define, but one she says kept her enmeshed in the cult for more than a decade. Manigault-Newman’s breaking point, in her words, was when chatter about the “N-word tape”—a rumored recording of Trump using the racial slur during his Apprentice days—became “intense again” last fall. Manigault-Newman writes that she has not heard the alleged tape herself, but that she has confirmed through “three sources” that it exists. It is for this reason, she concludes, that she was “brusquely” fired on December 17, 2017, from her post as an assistant to the president, with Chief of Staff John Kelly deep in fear of what she might know, and what she might reveal publicly.

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

On June 25, Timm Wrase awoke in Vienna and groggily scrolled through an online repository of newly posted physics papers. One title startled him into full consciousness.

The paper, by the prominent string theorist Cumrun Vafa of Harvard and his collaborators, conjectured a simple formula dictating which kinds of universes are allowed to exist and which are forbidden, according to string theory. The leading candidate for a “theory of everything” weaving the force of gravity together with quantum physics, string theory defines all matter and forces as vibrations of tiny strands of energy. The theory permits some 10⁵⁰⁰ different solutions: a vast, varied “landscape” of possible universes.* String theorists like Wrase and Vafa have strived for years to place our particular universe somewhere in this landscape of possibilities.

Few have enjoyed quite so spectacular a comeback under President Donald Trump as the conservative polemicist and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. In 2012, D’Souza resigned as president of a Christian college amid charges of adultery and deception. In 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign-finance laws. He was sentenced to eight months of confinement followed by 52 months probation.

Now, as the saying goes, D’Souza is back—and bigger than ever. He has reinvented himself as something like the court intellectual of the age of Trump. Trump pardoned D’Souza on May 31, 2018. At the beginning of August, Donald Trump Jr. co-hosted the premiere of D’Souza’s latest movie, Death of a Nation. The movie compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, and his Democratic opponents to Nazis. Afterward, Trump Jr. delivered a memorable summation of what he had learned from the film. “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there … and you look at it compared to, like, the DNC platform of today, and you’re saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it’s actually scary.”