The president canceled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s planned congressional delegation trip overseas, after she disinvited him from delivering the State of the Union.
It’s Thursday, January 17. The partial government shutdown is now in its 27th day.
‘Zero-Tolerance’ Policy: Donald Trump’s administration likely separated thousands more children from their parents than previously thought since the practice of family separations first spiked in 2017, a new inspector general report finds. While administration officials had once denied that a family separation policy was ever official, it was revealed in 2018 that more than 2,000 children had been separated from their parents and placed in custody elsewhere, sometimes in facilities thousands of miles away from the border.
Tit for Tat: After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disinvited Trump from delivering the State of the Union, the president retaliated today by canceling Pelosi’s planned congressional delegation trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan. With tempers on both sides running high, the shutdown now seems even further from a resolution, reports Russell Berman.
Shutdown Watch: The federal-government shutdown is deeply unpopular among voters, but Trump and GOP senators don’t seem to care—they’ve grown used to representing only a minority of Americans, writes Ronald Brownstein.
Impeach Donald Trump(Yoni Appelbaum)
“The United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order. That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed.” → Read on.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has the Better Tax Argument(Derek Thompson)
“When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this month that the United States should tax income over $10 million by 70 percent, it galvanized something unusual: a broad and substantive national conversation about the design and purpose of federal tax policy. No, I’m just kidding. It kicked off a lot of screaming about socialism, especially on cable news.” → Read on.
Barr May Do Exactly What Trump Wants(Adam Serwer)
“Taken as a whole, Barr’s testimony is less comforting than it seemed. Barr is a respected party elder who possesses the legitimacy, legal acumen, and ideological convictions to shield the president and undermine the rule of law without committing the sort of ham-handed errors that could turn the public or Congress further against Trump.” → Read on.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
Readers told us:
“My specific addition would be his accusation that Obama bugged him late in 2016.” —Scott Brown, Carmel Valley, California
“The list doesn’t address candidate Trump … but in some ways that list is even more worrying, because it demonstrates just how ugly the mood in our country has become.” —Steven Coleman, Townsend, Massachusetts
Snapshot
A federal worker collects a free bag of groceries from Kraft Foods on the 27th day of the partial government shutdown in Washington, D.C. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters)
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