january/february 2018

Expect President Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the next few days. Maybe he won’t do it. Maybe he’ll change his mind. But Trump is apparently livid at Rosenstein and both The Washington Post and CNN have reported that he is actively contemplating Rosenstein’s removal. Trump urged people on Twitter last night to watch Sean Hannity, who in turn invited on his show a guest who egged the president on in firing his deputy attorney general. The air in Washington right now is thick with Rosenstein’s imminent removal.

Many people will not shed tears over Rosenstein if Trump, in fact, pulls the trigger. After all, Rosenstein played a shameful role in the firing of James Comey. He’s tried to keep a lot of masters happy in his year in office, and one risk of serving multiple masters is that none of them emerges fully satisfied. You risk ending up looking like a weasel.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been shaped by two Russia storylines. One concerns investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. The other involves a deepening rift between Russia and the United States over issues beyond Russian meddling in democratic processes: everything from the Ukrainian and Syrian conflicts to nuclear-arms buildups and the poisoning of a former Russian spy. These storylines have at times intersected. But this week, in the wake of an FBI raid on the office of Trump’s longtime lawyer and a suspected chemical-weapons attack by the Russian-backed Syrian government, they have collided in dramatic fashion.

Donald Trump’s supporters insist that the public shouldn’t lose faith in the president as Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice delve ever more deeply into his affairs. Sure, his personal attorney’s office was raided and his political associates keep having to strike deals after getting caught breaking the law.

But Trump supporters believe the president when he says that he is a victim of idiocy and corruption—that Jeff Sessions made “a very terrible mistake for the country” by recusing himself from the Russia investigation, that James Comey is out to besmirch his reputation, and that Rod Rosenstein  is enabling “a witch hunt.”

Now, I don’t think the evidence supports Trump’s claims. But for the sake of argument, imagine all of that is correct and that his supporters are right to believe it.

Richard Nixon needed a reason.

He’d resolved to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating his involvement in Watergate, more than three months before the Saturday Night Massacre, when Cox was eventually dispatched. It was only a matter of time until Nixon would find a suitable pretext to give him political cover—and soon, Cox gave him one. The investigator refused to accept a so-called compromise on Nixon’s secret White House tapes, whereby Cox would receive summaries of the recordings instead of the tapes themselves. The former president quickly moved to remove Cox from his post, and to dissolve the office of the special prosecutor itself.

This fraught period of the Watergate affair—which involved an elaborate, president-sanctioned cover-up in the aftermath of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters—is the closest historical parallel to the current moment. Like Nixon, President Trump appears eager to fire the man investigating campaign and White House officials’ culpability in a high-profile scandal: Robert Mueller, the special counsel examining a broad range of subjects related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. And like Nixon, Trump seems one false move away from following through.

Simply a collection of some amazing recent aerial images showing the vast diversity of landscapes across China, from cities to mountains, deserts to sea shores, and much more.

Let’s be blunt. Given what we know about President Trump’s impulsive nature, there are good odds that sometime soon he will fire the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or perhaps the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein (who, because Attorney General Jeff Sessions is recused, is currently supervising the Mueller investigation as acting attorney general). No doubt some of his advisers will convince him that this will help avoid scrutiny of his conduct. But that’s mostly wrong.

First, think about the situation in which Trump orders that Mueller be fired. Someone has to do it—and probably Rosenstein would refuse and be fired too. Eventually, though, some senior Trump loyalist in the department would pull the trigger and Mueller would be gone.

It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still who repeatedly calls a prison to do so. But after more than a year of meetings and negotiation, Arielle Baskin-Sommers from Yale University finally persuaded a maximum-security prison in Connecticut to let her work with their inmates, and to study those with psychopathic tendencies.

Psychopaths, by definition, have problems understanding the emotions of other people, which partly explains why they are so selfish, why they so callously disregard the welfare of others, and why they commit violent crimes at up to three times the rate of other people.

But curiously, they seem to have no difficulty in understanding what other people think, want, or believe—the skill variously known as perspective-taking, mentalizing, or theory of mind. “Their behavior seems to suggest that they don’t consider the thoughts of others,” says Baskin-Sommers, but their performance on experiments suggests otherwise. When they hear a story and are asked to explicitly say what a character is thinking, they can.

Paul Ryan is being roundly condemned for any number of sins, both real and imagined. On the left, the House speaker is being pilloried for his supposed devotion to the cause of enriching the already well-off at the expense of the poor and his failure to protect the interests of unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors, despite his insistence that he would do just that. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, fiscal doves and fiscal hawks alike are damning Ryan for the hypocrisy of railing against the dangers of deficits during the Obama years, while ushering in law policies that will massively increase them under President Donald Trump. Among Trump loyalists, he is denounced as a creature of the much-loathed Republican establishment, who has undermined the president’s agenda at every turn. Meanwhile, some of his erstwhile conservative admirers are dismayed by the fact that Ryan, the consummate team player, is stepping down at such an inopportune moment for House Republicans. So the question of the moment seems to be: Should he be tarred and feathered, or just exiled to the icy wastes of Siberia?

In the early ‘90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently?

Fleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you?

Today, 16 questions like this comprise the VARK questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” VARK, which stands for “Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic," sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences.  (“I learned much later that vark is Dutch for “pig,” Fleming wrote later, “and I could not get a website called vark.com because a pet shop in Pennsylvania used it for selling aardvarks—earth pigs!”)

The reports of yet another Israeli Air Force strike this week on a base near Homs show that there is a new reality in Syria, taking shape as the civil war draws to a close—one that creates a predetermined chronicle of collision between Israel and Iran, on the soil of a third party. The routing of ISIS and the reestablishment of Bashar al-Assad's rule across much of the state of Syria, alongside the seeming lack of American interest in the country except after major chemical attacks, is facilitating the expansion of Iran’s influence—indeed its de facto takeover—in much of the country. And with each passing day the sensation in Israel, of standing alone against the Iranian gambit to turn Syria into an Iranian forward base, grows more intense. The only thing that might change it is change of American policy.