july/august 2001

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.

BESSEMER, Ala.—It was hulking, it was orange, and its name was Trump.

Randy Johnson looked on as his new 220-ton excavator carved up the ground, clearing the field of rocks to help unearth the coal underneath. Four weeks earlier, the central Alabama mine’s 22 employees had gathered to christen the $2.7 million purchase, painting “TRUMP” in white block letters along the excavator’s side. The day I visited, a recent Friday in July, those letters gleamed under the punishing southern sun, the machine’s every move—every swivel at the base, every curl of the claw—an implicit tribute to the 45th president.

It’s tradition in the mining industry to name the “big machines.” Apart from the land itself, they represent the bulk of capital for a new site. For Johnson, though, this excavator was emblematic of much more. The 71-year-old Alabama native and mining veteran had bowed out of the industry in 2014, when he says the Obama administration’s “war on coal” pummeled the market. But with Donald Trump’s election came a wave of “optimism,” he told me: optimism that the crush of regulations would ebb, that the “dirty” caricatures of the industry, aggravated by Barack Obama, would start to soften. So at the turn of the year, when he learned of an idle reserve in Bessemer, Johnson reopened his company, called one of his old foremen, and made the largest investment of his career.  

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.

In 1993, The New York Times published an article headlined “Rap’s Embrace of ‘Nigger’ Fires Bitter Debate.” It’s not a word likely to find its way into headlines today.

Sometime in the past 25 years, using that word became the only proof of racism that much of the country is willing to accept. The dividing line is hard to find, but one pivotal moment came during the O. J. Simpson trial, as Simpson’s defense team fought to get a tape of Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman using the word admitted as evidence. Fuhrman had previously denied using the word in the past decade; the defense tracked down a recording of Fuhrman using it in conversation with a scriptwriter who was working on a film about the LAPD.

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.

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 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.

The first half of the killer whale’s scientific name—Orcinus orca—comes from the Latin for “of the realms of the dead.” For one population of orcas living in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, that etymology has taken on a newly dark resonance.

Last month, a 20-year-old female orca named Tahlequah (J35) gave birth to a male calf that died after half an hour. While many orca mothers have been seen carrying the bodies of their dead calves for a day or so, Tahlequah did so for 17 days—a heartbreaking tour that captured the world’s attention, and that ended last Friday. “I have never seen that kind of grief,” says Ken Balcomb from the Center for Whale Research.

Meanwhile, scientists noticed that a 3-year-old female named Scarlet (J50) was looking severely emaciated, with her ribs showing through her side. They have since given her a shot of antibiotics, via dart, and are considering feeding her more medications embedded within live salmon.

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.