Todd Akin Takes Back Apology Over 'Legitimate Rape' Theory

Trump's Moral Holiday

David Frum

The permissiveness of Republican leaders who acquiesce to violence, collusion, and corruption is encouraging more of the same.

In the annals of the Trump era, May 25, 2017, will deserve a special mark. Four remarkable things happened on Thursday, each of which marks a way that this presidency is changing the nation.

The first remarkable thing was President Trump’s speech at the NATO summit in Brussels. Many European governments had hoped—which is a polite way to say that they had suggested and expected—that Trump would reaffirm the American commitment to defend NATO members if attacked. This is the point of the whole enterprise after all! Here’s how it was done by President Obama at the NATO summit after the Russian invasion of Crimea:

First and foremost, we have reaffirmed the central mission of the Alliance. Article 5 enshrines our solemn duty to each other—“an armed attack against one … shall be considered an attack against them all.” This is a binding, treaty obligation. It is non-negotiable. And here in Wales, we’ve left absolutely no doubt—we will defend every Ally.

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Report: Jared Kushner Asked Kislyak for Use of Russian Communications Facilities

Matt Ford and Adam Serwer

The Washington Post reports that the president’s son-in-law suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities to create a secret channel to Moscow.

Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to President Trump and his son-in-law, suggested to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak that he be allowed to use Russian diplomatic facilities to communicate securely with Moscow, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The request reportedly came in a meeting in Trump Tower at the beginning of December that included Kushner, Kislyak, and former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn. It came to the attention of American officials through intercepts of Russian communications in which Kislyak relayed the request to his superiors in Moscow; the officials who spoke to the Post specified that they were not monitoring either the meeting or the communications of the Americans who were present.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

The Lesser Part of Valor

Adam Serwer

Preston Brooks, Greg Gianforte, and the American tradition of disguising cowardice as bravery.

You wouldn’t say that Preston Brooks sucker-punched Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856—but only because he used a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, began bludgeoning Sumner, the anti-slavery Massachusetts Senator, while Sumner wasn’t looking, and beat him unconscious as Sumner was still bent under his desk trying to stand up.

Brooks and his supporters in the South saw the incident as an act of great valor, as the historian Manisha Shinha writes. Brooks bragged that “for the first five or six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf.” The pro-slavery Richmond Enquirer wrote that it considered the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Other “southern defenders of Brooks,” Sinha writes, praised Brooks for his “manly spirit” and mocked Sumner for his “unmanly submission.” It would have been manlier for the unarmed Sumner not to have been ambushed.

洛拉：我家的奴隶

Alex Tizon

她与我们家人一起生活了五十六年。她带大了我和我的兄弟姐妹，从早到晚做饭做清洁，从来没有工资。十一岁的我，一个典型的美国孩子，意识到她其实是我们家的奴隶。

她的骨灰装满了一个黑色塑料盒子，如烤面包机一般大小，重三磅半。去年七月，我用一个帆布口袋把这个盒子包起来，装在行李箱里，横越太平洋，飞去了马尼拉。我要从那里坐车去一个小乡村，去把这个在我家为奴五十六年的女人的骨灰交出去。

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Russell Berman

The president’s business tells lawmakers it is too difficult to track all its foreign revenue in accordance with constitutional requirements, and it hasn’t asked Congress for a permission slip.

Days before taking office, Donald Trump said his company would donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, part of an effort to avoid even the appearance of a conflict with the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Now, however, the Trump Organization is telling Congress that determining exactly how much of its profits come from foreign governments is simply more trouble than it’s worth.

In response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s company sent a copy of an eight-page pamphlet detailing how it plans to track payments it receives from foreign governments at the firm’s many hotels, golf courses, and restaurants across the globe. But while the Trump Organization said it would set aside all money it collects from customers that identify themselves as representing a foreign government, it would not undertake a more intensive effort to determine if a payment would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on public office holders accepting an “emolument” from a foreign state.

Why Didn’t Jared and Ivanka Report Their Art Collection?

Kriston Capps

Is it that they take art so seriously, they don’t think of it as money?

Two weeks ago, Ivanka Trump caught some alone time in Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room. Staged at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the piece is a living room en blanc, a white-out room filled with all-white furniture and personal effects, that visitors are invited to cover over with tiny colorful dot stickers. The piece is mesmerizing, an Instagram sensation; a contemporary art lover like Trump wasn’t likely to miss out on the hottest ticket (and snap) in town.

Trump is an art lover, that much is plain. Her own Instagram feed is chock full of images of contemporary art from the Park Avenue condo she and husband Jared Kushner share. Her affection for art—not normally something even her detractors would likely begrudge her—may have worked against her family this week. As reporters at Artnet discovered, Kushner, a senior White House advisor, failed to report the couple’s extensive art collection in required financial disclosures.

President Trump delivers a speech during the Arab-Islamic-American Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 21, 2017. — Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

What Trump's Ramadan Message Was Really About

Yasmeen Serhan

The president urged Muslims to “reject violence” in a statement that contrasted sharply with those issued by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

President Trump wished all Muslims a “joyful Ramadan” in a statement Friday, just hours before the start of the month-long Islamic holiday during which those observing fast from sunrise to sunset.

Though such statements are commonplace among American presidents, Trump’s remarks took on a markedly different tone than did those of his predecessors. While the statement, like those of presidents past, noted the “acts of charity and meditation” that define the holy month, it went on to focus on a topic that has been at the forefront of Trump’s first trip overseas as president: terrorism.

“This year, the holiday begins as the world mourns the innocent victims of barbaric terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and Egypt, acts of depravity that are directly contrary to the spirit of Ramadan,” the White House statement reads, adding that “such acts only steel our resolve to defeat the terrorists and their perverted ideology.”

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.