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Four women make the case for a strike

Vice President Mike Pence, who during the election implied that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton broke the law when she used a private email server as secretary of state, confirmed that he conducted official business as governor of Indiana using a private AOL email account, which had been hacked. Trump suggested that a series of recent bomb threats against Jewish community centers and acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries could have been an effort by his opponents to make his supporters “look bad,” gave a speech before a joint session of Congress in which he condemned hate crimes, and rejected the notion that his senior staff should take an ethics-training course. “This is,” Trump tweeted of his wiretap allegations, “Watergate.” Read more...

Remembering a homeless couple shot in San Francisco's Mission District

At the world's largest lesbian wedding

Trump’s economic authoritarianism

Fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, who was Trump’s first choice for secretary of labor, withdrew himself from consideration after a video surfaced of his ex-wife accusing him of domestic abuse; and Trump nominated as Puzder’s replacement R. Alexander Acosta, a former U.S. attorney in Miami who was criticized for not pressing federal charges against Jeffery Epstein, a billionaire and former Trump associate who was accused of having sex with dozens of underage girls and who pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.The White House announced Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as its second nominee for national-security adviser, after Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former adviser, was asked to resign and Vice Admiral Robert Harward turned down the job, allegedly calling it a “shit sandwich.”

Andrew Cockburn on turning Texas blue, Masha Gessen on the spread of antigay ideology, Calvin Baker on how Obama negotiated America's racial tightrope, Mary Cuddehe on the dealth penalty as a conservative conundrum, a story by David Szalay, and more

The White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks it claimed were underreported on by the media, including the December 2015 attack in “San Bernadino [sic]”; the Department of Education tweeted a quotation attributed to “W.E.B. DeBois [sic],” then tweeted its “deepest apologizes [sic]”; and the Library of Congress began and then stopped selling an official inauguration portrait of Trump that includes the quotation “no challenge is to [sic] great.”

Victims of terrorism discuss Donald Trump’s Muslim ban

The story of a Tibetan refugee living in California, as told to the illustrator

The vocational training of American real estate tycoons is strict and pitiless.

Trump’s national-security adviser said that the nation of Iran was “on notice” after it tested a ballistic missile, and Iran responded by noting that “only seven minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv.” Trump hung up on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and warned Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that he might send U.S. troops across the border to deal with “bad hombres.” At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump, who was introduced by the producer of the TV show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, gave a speech asking the audience to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings. Read more...

Though the refugee camp may have vanished, its inhabitants will not

Trump declared that he would initiate an investigation of widespread voter fraud, which a five-year Bush Administration investigation found not to exist, and then claimed that the fraud was perpetuated by “illegals,” “dead people,” and people registered to vote in more than one state, a category that includes several members of his Cabinet, his son-in-law, at least one of his children, and the man who alerted him to the purported fraud in the first place. Trump released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jewish people, and Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s secretary, who claimed she “knew nothing” about the Holocaust until after the war, died at the age of 106. Read more...

Scenes of family detention centers in the United States juxtaposed with illustrations of mourning doves migrating from Central America to Canada.

At an inaugural ball attended by the bounty hunter and reality-television star Duane “Dog” Chapman, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway punched a man in the face. In demonstrations across Washington, groups of protesters lit a limousine on fire and broke the windows of a Bank of America, a white supremacist who said “sure” when asked whether he liked black people was punched in the face, a man marched with two alpacas and a llama to demand better trade policies, and at least 10 journalists simultaneously photographed a trash-can fire. Read more...

A weekend of alternative estimations

Being a DACA enrollee in Trump's America

Scenes from Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, D.C. All photographs by Philip Montgomery for Harper's Magazine.

A numerical investigation of Donald Trump's appointees

Our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump's presidency

A family detention center playset

Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. Read more...

On family, fate, and Packers football

May Jeong on the peace process in Afghanistan, Anthony Heilbut on black America’s civil war over gay rights, Alice Gregory on the world of miniatures, a story by John Edgar Wideman, a resister’s guide to Trump, and more

Trump denied a leaked and unverified report from a former British intelligence officer that claimed that the Russian government had secretly filmed Trump in a hotel room in Moscow with prostitutes whom he paid to urinate on one another while on a bed formerly slept in by current U.S. president Barack Obama; and it was reported that a man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, admitted to masturbating into a dirty diaper while watching child gymnastics in a church rectory school and then lighting an American flag on fire, which caused the church to go up in flames. Read more...

A Brazilian priest was stabbed in the back of the neck by a man he was trying to embrace during a televised mass; a 48-year-old Catholic priest was accused of advertising 15 of his lovers on a wife-swapping site, organizing orgies in his home, and concealing pornographic home videos in cases labeled with the names of popes; and, in Vatican City, cardinals protested the opening of a McDonald’s. “It’s,” said a cardinal, “perverse.” Read more...

My summer as a military propagandist in Iraq

“Betty at Port Glasgow Town Hall Xmas Party,” a photograph by Mark Neville, from the monograph Mark Neville: Fancy Pictures, which was published last month by Steidl. Image © Mark Neville. Courtesy Steidl

We mourn the recent passing of John Berger, a long-time and much valued contributor to Harper’s Magazine.