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U.S. President and Celebrity Apprentice executive producer Donald Trump, whose campaign speeches encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of Democrats, whose butler said former president Barack Obama should be “hung,” and whose campaign advisor said his former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton should be “put in the firing line and shot,” stated in response to the shooting of Republican representative Steve Scalise that Americans are “strongest” when they are “unified”; and then tweeted that the Democratic party should be investigated for its ties to Russia.[1][2][3][4] Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general and former campaign surrogate, told Congress he did not “believe” he had any contact with agents of Russian companies during Trump’s presidential run, and a lobbyist for a state-run Russian energy company said Sessions had hosted him for dinner on two occasions during the campaign.[5][6] Former FBI director James Comey testified that prior to being fired by Trump he had not been investigating the president directly for his campaign’s ties to Russia, and Trump said that he was “100 percent” willing to testify before Congress; and it was later reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had opened an investigation into Trump for firing Comey, and the White House said Trump was not willing to testify before Congress.[7][8][9][10] Trump tweeted that the Russia probe is a “witch hunt” being led by his own deputy attorney general, and it was reported that Mueller had begun investigating Trump associates for money laundering and that the charity foundation of Trump’s son Eric paid the Trump Organization more than $1 million for the use of a Trump golf course, which Eric had previously said had not charged the charity.[11][12][13] Eric, who said it wasn’t inappropriate that he still discussed Trump Organization profit reports with his father, said that his father had “zero conflicts of interest”; and Trump selected Eric’s wedding planner to run the multibillion-dollar federal housing department in New York.[14][15] Trump’s daughter Ivanka published photos of her condo depicting an art collection that was not disclosed to the federal government by her husband, Jared Kushner, who is a senior advisor to Trump and whose former real-estate company reportedly offered potential Chinese investors green cards in exchange for financing a New Jersey housing development.[16][17] Five members of Congress from Oregon joined a lawsuit alleging that Trump has illegally received money from foreign governments, citing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ownership of a floor of Trump World Tower, the United Arab Emirates’ leasing of space in Trump Tower, and foreign diplomats’ booking of rooms at Trump International Hotel, which is located five blocks from the White House.[18] Mueller hired 13 lawyers to assist him in his probe of the Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence hired a lawyer, and the personal lawyer for Trump, a former casino owner who was once sued for non-payment by lawyers who had defended him against claims that he hadn’t paid his workers, hired a lawyer.[19][20][21][22]
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More from Joe Kloc:
In 1899, the art critic Layton Crippen complained in the New York Times that private donors and committees had been permitted to run amok, erecting all across the city a large number of “painfully ugly monuments.” The very worst statues had been dumped in Central Park. “The sculptures go as far toward spoiling the Park as it is possible to spoil it,” he wrote. Even worse, he lamented, no organization had “power of removal” to correct the damage that was being done.
On December 3, 2016, less than a month after Donald Trump was elected president, Amanda Litman sat alone on the porch of a bungalow in Costa Rica, thinking about the future of the Democratic Party. As Hillary Clinton’s director of email marketing, Litman raised $180 million and recruited 500,000 volunteers over the course of the campaign. She had arrived at the Javits Center on Election Night, arms full of cheap beer for the campaign staff, minutes before the pundits on TV announced that Clinton had lost Wisconsin. Later that night, on her cab ride home to Brooklyn, Litman asked the driver to pull over so she could throw up.
In the early Eighties, Andy King, the coach of the Seawolves, a swim club in Danville, California, instructed Debra Denithorne, aged twelve, to do doubles — to practice in the morning and the afternoon. King told Denithorne’s parents that he saw in her the potential to receive a college scholarship, and even to compete in the Olympics. Tall swimmers have an advantage in the water, and by the time Denithorne turned thirteen, she was five foot eight. She dropped soccer and a religious group to spend more time at the pool.
One sunny winter afternoon in western Michigan, I took a ride with Leon Slater, a slight sixty-four-year-old man with a neatly trimmed white beard and intense eyes behind his spectacles. He wore a faded blue baseball cap, so formed to his head that it seemed he slept with it on. Brickyard Road, the street in front of Slater’s home, was a mess of soupy dirt and water-filled craters. The muffler of his mud-splattered maroon pickup was loose, and exhaust fumes choked the cab. He gripped the wheel with hands leathery not from age but from decades moving earth with big machines for a living. What followed was a tooth-jarring tour of Muskegon County’s rural roads, which looked as though they’d been carpet-bombed.
Abby was a breech birth but in the thirty-one years since then most everything has been pretty smooth. Sweet kid, not a lot of trouble. None of them were. Jack and Stevie set a good example, and she followed. Top grades, all the way through. Got on well with others but took her share of meanness here and there, so she stayed thoughtful and kind. There were a few curfew or partying things and some boys before she was ready, and there was one time on a school trip to Chicago that she and some other kids got caught smoking crack cocaine, but that was so weird it almost proved the rule. No big hiccups, master’s in ecology, good state job that lets her do half time but keep benefits while Rose is little.
Estimated portion of French citizens with radical-Islamist beliefs who grew up in Muslim families:
Human hands are more primitive than chimp hands.
Trump declared flashlights obsolete as he handed them out to Puerto Ricans, 90 percent of whom had no electricity in their homes; and tweeted that he wouldn’t keep providing federal hurricane relief “forever” to Puerto Rico, a US territory that the secretary of energy referred to as a “country.”
"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."
© 2017 Harper’s Magazine Foundation. November 2017 cover illustration by Steve Brodner
