october 2012

The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.

This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.

I. An Angry Little Town

Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control.

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The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”

When Americans look abroad these days, they see Donald Trumps everywhere: In Brazil, whose new president, Jair Bolsonaro, endorses torture, threatens to pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement, and suggests that his country was better off under military rule. In the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and threatened to impose martial law nationwide. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has quashed the free press, enriched his cronies, and stoked fear and hatred of refugees. In Poland, whose Law and Justice Party has undermined the independence of the supreme court. Even in Italy, whose leaders demonize immigrants, bash the European Union, and pal around with Steve Bannon.

NEW YORK — With his teary-eyed and grim-faced family arrayed behind him, Michael Cohen laid claim to his freedom in a federal courtroom here on Wednesday morning. Not from incarceration, of course—Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer, fixer, and foot soldier knew he was soon headed to prison after he pleaded guilty to what a federal judge called “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”

No, the 52-year-old Cohen was declaring his formal, surely irrevocable liberty from the clutches of the president of the United States.

“Today,” he told Judge William H. Pauley III in a deep, steady voice, “is the day I am getting my freedom back.”

“I have been living,” Cohen continued, “in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I admired.”

Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself.

Just two years into his presidency, the New York real-estate mogul turned politician faces at least two separate criminal investigations, while half a dozen former advisers, including his former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national-security adviser, foreign-policy adviser, and personal attorney have all pleaded guilty to or been convicted of serious crimes. That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the American legal system makes white-collar crimes difficult to prove, by making guilt conditional on a defendant’s state of mind, a notoriously high standard.

Nevertheless, Trump has done his best to ensure that we all know what he’s thinking, even as his legal peril grows. Last Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York claimed in a filing that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, had been directed during the campaign to pay hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with the president. Those payments, according to the filing, were laundered through shell corporations and reimbursed by the president’s private company. Effectively, the president’s own Justice Department accused him of ordering his personal attorney to commit a felony.

President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday, just days after directly implicating Trump in a felony stemming from hush-money payments to two women made just weeks before the 2016 election.

The sentencing marked the culmination of a months-long saga that began in April with a dramatic FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office and ended with Trump’s most loyal lieutenant and fixer—who once said he would take a bullet for his boss—turning against the president and implicating him directly in criminal misconduct. In Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Cohen apologized to his family and to “the people of the United States.”

“Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he said in a prepared statement. “I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I deeply admired.” He said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”

It’s a situation familiar to many women: You’re in a contentious meeting with male colleagues. Your turn to talk comes around, and just as you get going, someone else begins talking loudly. Then another person. Within seconds, your colleagues are talking among themselves, and you’re trying to find a place to jump back into the conversation you were leading just moments before.

Today it happened in front of national media at the White House, during a heated exchange over funding for the border wall and a looming government shutdown. This particular conversation included President Donald Trump and the Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the latter of whom Trump interrupted 15 times in a short discussion.

Every day, as Americans dry their hands, soak up their spills, and wipe their counters, they are—whether they know it or not—contributing to their country’s dominance. In an era of waning American exceptionalism, inhabitants can at least pride themselves on an underratedly important, probably shameful distinction: They reside in the paper-towel capital of the world.

This status is unquestioned. According to data shared with me by the market-research firm Euromonitor International, global spending on paper towels for use at home (but not in office or public bathrooms) added up to about $12 billion in 2017, and Americans accounted for about $5.7 billion of that total. In other words, the U.S. spends nearly as much on paper towels as every other country in the world combined.

There’s no greater evidence of the passage of time than the Republican Party’s autopsy report on its failed 2012 election cycle. “By the year 2050 we’ll be a majority-minority country and in both 2008 and 2012 President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority groups,” former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said at a 2013 press conference announcing the report.

The document itself essentially admits both to the fact that the Republican Party was a party of white men, and that the only way to compete would be to neutralize the “demographic destiny” of Democrats, embracing immigration reform and becoming a true multiracial and multiethnic “big tent.” It’s a strikingly candid report. It reads like speculative fiction today.

“I was jealous. Your beauty, your bravery, your motherhood. You seemed to surpass me in every way.”

That’s Elizabeth I, queen of England, meeting her cousin Mary I for the first and only time, in one of the climactic moments of the new movie Mary Queen of Scots. The scene is a strange one for several reasons, the first being its fanciful fabrication—the two queens, in reality, never met in person—but another being the film’s use of the imagined meeting as a chance to flip its own script. Mary, her throne and her life in jeopardy after one of the schemes against her finally proved effective, is asking her cousin for protection; she is begging for her life. And yet it is Elizabeth, in this scene as in so many others in the movie, who is presented as pitiable. The English monarch has a massive army and extensive political power, yes, but Mary is prettier. And Mary is a mother. And so: You seemed to surpass me in every way.