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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 the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.
A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world. Known as anchor-outs, they make their homes a quarter mile from the shore, on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels, doing their best, with little or no money, to survive. Life is not easy. There is always a storm on the way, one that might capsize their boats and consign their belongings to the bottom of the bay. But when the water is calm and the harbormaster is away, the anchor-outs call their world Shangri-lito. They row from one boat to the next, repairing their homes with salvaged scrap wood and trading the herbs and vegetables they’ve grown in ten-gallon buckets on their decks. If a breeze is blowing, the air fills with the clamoring of jib hanks. Otherwise, save for a passing motorboat or a moment of distant chatter, there is only the sound of the birds: the sparrows that hop along the wreckage of catamarans, the egrets that hunt herring in the eelgrass, and the terns that circle in the sky above.
When I met Raúl Mijango, in a courtroom in San Salvador, he was in shackles, awaiting trial. He was paunchier than in the photos I’d seen of him, bloated from diabetes, and his previously salt-and-pepper goatee had turned fully white. The masked guard who was escorting him stood nearby, and national news cameras filmed us from afar. Despite facing the possibility of a long prison sentence, Mijango seemed relaxed, smiling easily as we spoke. “Bolívar, Fidel, Gandhi, and Mandela have also passed through this school,” he told me, “and I hope that some of what they learned during their years in prison we should learn as well.”
1. As closing time at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery approached on May 25, 2018, Igor Podporin, a balding thirty-seven-year-old with sunken eyes, circled the Russian history room. The elderly museum attendees shooed him toward the exit, but Podporin paused by a staircase, turned, and rushed back toward the Russian painter Ilya Repin’s 1885 work Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581. He picked up a large metal pole—part of a barrier meant to keep viewers at a distance—and smashed the painting’s protective glass, landing three more strikes across Ivan’s son’s torso before guards managed to subdue him. Initially, police presented Podporin’s attack as an alcohol-fueled outburst and released a video confession in which he admitted to having knocked back two shots of vodka in the museum cafeteria beforehand. But when Podporin entered court four days later, dressed in the same black Columbia fleece, turquoise T-shirt, and navy-blue cargo pants he had been arrested in, he offered a different explanation for the attack. The painting, Podporin declared, was a “lie.” With that accusation, he thrust himself into a centuries-old debate about the legacy of Russia’s first tsar, a debate that has reignited during Vladimir Putin’s reign. The dispute boils down to one deceptively simple question: Was Ivan really so terrible?
Cost of renting a giant panda from the Chinese government, per day:
A recent earthquake in Chile was found to have shifted the city of Concepción ten feet to the west, shortened Earth’s days by 1.26 microseconds, and shifted the planet’s axis by nearly three inches.
A new study showed that, between 2011 and 2018, the number of human feces left on San Francisco streets increased by more than 400 percent.
“Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes.”
© 2018 Harper’s Magazine Foundation.
