The Atlantic: America Has No President

It is not that Trump has been silent. Far from it: His Twitter feed has been a supercharged version of its normal self. Trump has attacked Joe Biden, slurred reporters, insulted leaders on the front lines of protests, and claimed federal authority he doesn’t have. This is the sort of behavior we’d call unhinged from any other president, but the word has lost any power through its endless, justified invocation throughout his tenure. In any case, the tweeting suggests a president flailing around for a message that sticks and for a sense of control.

What has been missing is any sort of behavior traditionally associated with the presidency. Trump initially condemned George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, but since then there have been no statements intended to quell anger, bridge divisions, or heal wounds. There have been no public appearances, either; Trump traveled all the way to Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch on Saturday, but hasn’t managed to travel in front of cameras for a formal statement. [...]

“He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on CNN last night, referring to Trump’s disastrous comments after a violent white-nationalist march in Virginia in 2017. “He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet, and I wish that he would just be quiet.” [...]

Nothing in Trump’s statement to the Times touches the demonstrations or shows even a rudimentary understanding of what has inspired them. The paper reports that “aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race.” Unsurprisingly, Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior and comments, has not warmed to that explanation. Instead, he has gravitated toward conspiracy theories. Yesterday, he tweeted that he would designate antifa—a familiar rhetorical target—as a terrorist organization, even though he has no federal authority to do so. He also blamed outside agitators for unrest, a claim debunked by his own allies at National Review. It seems true that there are some violent protesters trying to stir up trouble, but they are plainly neither the starting point nor the majority of the marchers.

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Freakonomics: Does the President Matter as Much as You Think?

We asked this same question nearly a decade ago. The answer then: probably not. But a lot has changed since then, and we’re three years into one of the most anomalous presidencies in American history. So once again we try to sort out presidential signal from noise. What we hear from legal and policy experts may leave you surprised, befuddled — and maybe infuriated.

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Politico: Trump tweets about Barr interview after AG complains about Trump tweeting

Barr's rebuke of Trump's online conduct came after the president tweeted his displeasure Tuesday with federal prosecutors' seven-to-nine-year sentencing proposal for Stone. [...]

Barr confirmed Thursday that he had personally interceded to walk back Stone's stiff sentencing recommendation, but maintained that he did so hours before Trump tweeted his objection. [...]

Although Barr's statements could be viewed as a sign of heightened tensions between the president and his attorney general, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham claimed Thursday that Trump was not irked by Barr‘s interview. [...]

Some Democratic lawmakers, however, have speculated that Barr's admonishment of Trump was a calculated maneuver aimed at quelling outrage within his department, rather than a genuine plea meant to curb the president's behavior.

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Politico: How Trump Changed After Charlottesville

Nobody understands the attention economy better than President Donald Trump. Whenever he slips from his coveted position as Topic A in the news, or whenever the news angle of the latest reports displeases him, you can count on Trump to bludgeon his way back to control the media agenda. This time it was with a series of tweets hammering four congresswomen of color as un-American, and telling them to go back where they came from. [...]

At a Monday Cabinet meeting, Trump parried the question of whether his tweets being called racist bother him. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. During the week, he escalated his attacks on the Squad. And at a Wednesday evening campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump tore into Rep. Omar for seven minutes, inspiring the crowd to chant, “Send her back! Send her back!” [...]

Why has Trump suddenly come to terms with his racism? It’s always a mistake to ascribe everything Trump does to forethought and calculation. He’s too impulsive for that. But we know from his Wednesday comments (made before the rally) to the Daily Mail that he’s pleased about the noise generated by his attacks. That goes a long way toward explaining why he pressed the racism button all week, and it’s a strong clue that he will put his thumb on it during the campaign. “The only thing they have, that they can do is, now, play the race card,” Trump said, turning the race onus back on the Squad. “Which they’ve always done.” Omar probably delighted Trump on Thursday when she told Washington reporters that he was a “fascist.” Set your watch for his return fire.

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Today in Focus: The real Boris Johnson: politician or journalist?

Before entering politics, Boris Johnson made his name first as a reporter and then a columnist rising to fame with the Daily Telegraph and then the Spectator. But it was not always a smooth ascent: he was sacked from the Times as a graduate trainee for making up a quote and as a Brussels correspondent generating dozens of controversial stories that poked fun at the EU institutions and refashioned Euroscepticism in the UK years before the Brexit vote.

But one particular incident stands out: so-called ‘Guppygate’. In 1990, Johnson was secretly recorded agreeing to provide the address of the News of the World reporter Stuart Collier to his friend Darius Guppy, who wanted to arrange for the journalist to have his ribs cracked as revenge for investigating his activities. Collier has told the Guardian he wants a full apology from Johnson.

Attempting to separate fact from fiction in Johnson’s journalistic career has not been easy: his biographers Andrew Gimson and Sonia Purnell both worked with him and between them have spoken to hundreds of his former colleagues. They describe to Anushka Asthana the rise of a highly ambitious man who once wrote two opposing columns before the EU referendum campaign before choosing to back leave.

Also today: Sabrina Siddiqui on Donald Trump’s weekend tweets, which have been widely condemned as racist.

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euronews: Pope bombarded with insults after tweeting to pray for migrants

Users were quick to react to the tweet with some asking the pope to think instead of earthquake victims or of Vincent Lambert, the quadriplegic Frenchman whose parents recently accepted to end life support.

Some said the Pope should spend more time talking about Jesus and other religious topics.[...]

The same day, the front page of Italy's daily la Repubblica newspaper ran the headline: "Catholics at a crossroads: the Pope or Salvini."

The newspaper interviewed the Jesuit Father Sorge who compared Italy's new security decree, which includes provisions that clamp down on migrant entry to Italy, with racial laws of the Fascist regime in the country in 1938.

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The New York Review of Books: The Rules of the Game

The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination will begin to assume a more concrete shape on the nights of June 26 and 27, when twenty candidates take the stage in Miami for the first round of debates. They qualified to participate by meeting one of two criteria before June 12: securing a minimum number of donors (at least 65,000) or registering more than one percent support in three major polls. The qualifying criteria are the same for the second round of debates in Detroit on July 30 and 31. For the third round, to be held on September 12 and 13 (in a location not yet chosen), the criteria are essentially doubled, which could winnow the field considerably. The Democratic National Committee has sanctioned twelve debates, to be held until next April. [...]

There are reasons to think that this time the nomination battle could drag into June 2020, when the primaries end, or even, some have suggested, all the way to the convention in July, making for the first truly contested Democratic convention since 1952, when Adlai Stevenson arrived and declared himself to have no interest in the nomination but delivered a welcoming speech so good that it ultimately led to the delegates choosing him on the third ballot over Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. The reasons have to do, first, with new rules the party wrote after the Clinton–Sanders battle in 2016, and, second, with a growing schism in the party between its two poles of influence in the age of social media: the younger, urban, and more left-leaning people who carry out a daily and often pestiferous political dialogue on Twitter, and the older and more traditionally liberal-to-moderate people who make up the actual backbone of the party across America. If there is a division within the party that will bring it to ruin in 2020, this is it. [...]

The most contentious issue they faced was the power of the high-ranking party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates, a category that had been conjured into existence after the 1980 election to try to ensure the success of mainstream candidates (the move was a delayed response to the 1972 nomination of George McGovern, whose campaign was seen as too left-wing by many party regulars and who lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide). Superdelegates could vote at the convention, and in 2016 they gave Clinton a big advantage. Many of them endorsed her before the primaries even began, and they were counted in the running delegate totals published daily in The New York Times, The Washington Post, fivethirtyeight.com, and other venues, perhaps giving the impression that she had earned more delegates in the primaries and caucuses than she had. [...]

Democrats in the Pew survey skew younger than their Republican counterparts. About 43 percent are under forty, and just 12 percent are over seventy (the numbers for Republicans in those categories are 32 and 17 percent, respectively). A rather remarkable 56 percent are female. Just 54 percent are white, as opposed to more than 70 percent of Democrats on social media, with blacks and Latinos constituting 19 percent each (Republicans are 81 percent white). Of four designated income levels, the most represented by far is the lowest, under $30,000, at 36 percent. Likewise, of four designated education levels, the most represented by far is high school or less, at 37 percent—although interestingly, 15 percent of Democrats have graduate degrees, while only 8 percent of Republicans do. About a third of Democrats don’t express a religious affiliation, which means two-thirds of them do, which again is quite different, at least in my experience, from Twitter Democrats, who seem for the most part irreligious.

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Politico: Emmanuel Macron’s plan to fix Facebook, YouTube and Twitter

France's proposed approach, which is laid out in a 32-page report authored by Benoit Loutrel, a former Google employee and telecoms regulator official, emphasizes flexibility and does not call for penalties over individual failures to police content by the platforms. Instead it urges much more regular oversight by regulators, focusing mainly on the processes and resources used to identify and remove hate speech.

In that sense, the French idea embraces some measures of self-regulation by large platforms — even if the report maintains that a social media company could face fines of up to 4 percent of its global annual revenue in the event of serious and repeated breaches of a yet-to-be-voted on hate speech law.[...]

In addition to legislation on fake news, France has championed a digital tax on the European stage and set it in motion nationally following the move's failure at the EU level. A member of Macron's party is also pushing a law against online hate speech that would force platforms to bring down flagged posts within 24 hours — one that is likely to be informed by Friday's report.

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Al Jazeera: New Zealand cabinet agrees on tougher gun laws in principle: PM

The New Zealand prime minister also announced an inquiry into the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch on Friday that left 50 people dead.

Ardern said the details are still to be worked out but the changes to the country's firearms laws will be announced in full within 10 days.

She also said that while the man charged with carrying out the shootings was not a New Zealand citizen, it could not ignore the problem of white supremacy supporters within the country. [...]

Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shootings during the first 24 hours after the massacre. [...]

Frustration was building among the families of victims as under Islam it is custom to conduct burials within 24 hours, but bodies will not be released until post-mortems are carried out.

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BBC4 Analysis: The Trumped Republicans

Republican insider Ron Christie discovers how Donald Trump's presidency is changing his party. Trump arrived in the White House offering a populist revolt in America, promising to drain what he calls "the swamp that is Washington D.C". So what does his own Republican Party - traditionally a bastion of the nation’s establishment - really make of him? Where is he taking them and what will he leave behind? Christie, a long-time Republican who has served in the West Wing under George W Bush, takes us on a journey behind the scenes to meet Trump’s inner circle - including figures like Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications, and to influential conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity. He talks to the supporters and the sceptics alike who watch in amazement as one of the most controversial presidents of all time takes his country and his party by storm.

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Metro News: Past of top Brexiteers comes back to haunt them on massive billboards

Giant posters have emerged showing previous quotes and promises of prominent Brexit politicians. 

Pro-Remain group Led By Donkeys put up the billboards around Dover to remind people of what our MPs said.

The group said: ‘If they want us to trust their judgment as we enter the choppy waters of Brexit it’s right that we remind ourselves of their record.’ 

The new posters include quotes from arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, Prime Minister Theresa May, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.  

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The Guardian: Who's afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Their fear is not irrational. Ocasio-Cortez has been using Twitter masterfully, as a way of directing the national political conversation. The Politico article compares her technique to that of Donald Trump, and this isn’t completely wrong: the president has long used his Twitter account to keep the media talking about whatever he wants them to be talking about. Democrats have long failed to keep pace – they end up reacting to whatever Trump says, rather than setting the agenda themselves. In Ocasio-Cortez we see (at last!) what it might look like for lefties to retake control – to begin talking about what we want to talk about rather than whatever nonsense Trump is spewing this week. [...]

If Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t made the remark, there would be no discussion. But she did, and so now there’s a discussion! Now Nobel prize winners are publicly pointing out that high taxes are good, and moderate Democrats are being pressured to endorse “radical” ideas. As the New York Times reported, she is pushing the Democrats to the left whether they like it or not. She has realized what Republicans have known for a long time: if people are talking about your agenda, even if they’re talking about how bad and silly it is, you are making that agenda more plausible. (It’s often called “shifting the Overton window”.) Yes, the National Review will squeal that X tax hike won’t be enough to pay for Y program. But you have got them on the defensive. [...]

This is concerning, of course. In order to get Democrats in Congress to move left, there have to be primary threats. This, historically, is one way socialists have won victories in the United States: they have forced the major political parties to move leftward in order to neutralize the socialist threat. It’s not surprising that Ocasio-Cortez is being asked not to “undermine” fellow Democrats, but it’s encouraging that so far she seems to be going her own way. Politico says that while she is cordial to her fellow party members, she does not give in: [...]

Conservatives cannot stop talking about Ocasio-Cortez. Sean Hannity literally repeats her agenda on live television and then thinks he’s the one winning! She drives them up the wall, and it’s fantastic. But there’s one person who never mentions her: Donald Trump. Strange, isn’t it? Trump mocks everyone on Twitter. But he has never once sent a tweet about her, even though they both have major presences on the platform. I suspect I know exactly why: he realizes that she’s better at this than him. He may be able to make jokes at the expense of Elizabeth Warren, but Ocasio-Cortez is better at online repartee than almost anyone else. He is wise to keep away from tangling with her. Just recently, when Joe Lieberman made a patronizing comment about Ocasio-Cortez not representing the future of the party, she gave a brief but devastating retort that made him look like an out-of-touch fogey. (I doubt he even understood it.)

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Vox: How the media should respond to Trump’s lies

George Lakoff He manipulates the media by constantly tweeting and saying more and more outrageous things. The media says, “Well, we have to cover the president. We have to repeat what he says.” But there is no real reason this has to happen. Journalists could, if they choose to, ignore the president’s tweets. [...]

There’s another possibility. Journalists could engage in what I’ve called “truth sandwiches,” which means that you first tell the truth; then you point out what the lie is and how it diverges from the truth. Then you repeat the truth and tell the consequences of the difference between the truth and the lie. If the media did this consistently, it would matter. It would be more difficult for Trump to lie. [...]

Many journalists still assume that language is neutral, that you can just repeat language and it’s completely neutral. In fact, language is never neutral. Language is always framed in a certain way, and it always has consequences. [...]

People think in terms of conceptual structures called frames and metaphors. It’s not just the facts. They have values, and they understand which facts fit into their conceptual framework. You can’t understand something if your brain doesn’t allow it, if your brain filters it out in terms of your values. Democrats seem not to understand this, and they keep trying to employ reason as a persuasive vehicle. I wish Enlightenment reasoning was an accurate model for how most people think and judge, but it isn’t, and we better acknowledge that fact.

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Haaretz: Why Are Some pro-Israel Voices Speaking Out Against Jamal Khashoggi?

Even as gruesome allegations emerge that he was tortured, murdered and dismembered after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, some Israel supporters have joined other figures on the right in describing Khashoggi as a terrorist sympathizer and fierce opponent of Israel. Their goal appears to be to counter a portrait of Khashoggi as a Saudi reformer and free speech activist, and perhaps derail pressure building on the White House to punish Saudi Arabia for his disappearance and presumed murder. [...]

Purveyors of the attacks on Khashoggi said they wanted to set the record straight. Other observers suggested that the public fight over Khashoggi’s reputation has to do with a number of issues central to the latest crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations: cultivating Saudi cooperation in the diplomatic fight against Iran, keeping the Saudis on board the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and maintaining the kingdom as a bulwark against violent forms of radical Islam.[...]

Donald Trump Jr. retweeted one of the earliest attacks on Khashoggi, from a correspondent for the PJ Media conservative website. The correspondent, Patrick Poole, had posted photos of interviews Khashoggi had conducted in the late 1980s with Osama bin Laden, who went on to found al-Qaeda and to plot the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. [...]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has touted emerging ties with Saudi Arabia and other countries as validating his strategy of downplaying peace with the Palestinians, believing he can make Israel at home in the region without the Palestinians. Bin Salman was a key figure in this strategy.

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The Atlantic: The Double Damage of the President’s Trump Tower Admission

Both Trump and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but the president has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, the president packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters. First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, the president again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If the president is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting? [...]

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

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Vox: Saudi Arabia is waging diplomatic war on … Canada

But while the vague threat of another 9/11 may have been accidental and not sanctioned by the Saudi government directly, the message coming out of Saudi Arabia over the past several days has been clear: Don’t fuck with us, Canada.

The arrests of Badawi and others that Canada was objecting to are part of a wider government crackdown on human rights, ordered by Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old crown prince who ascended to the position of next in line for the throne just a little over a year ago. [...]

This is a new, bold Saudi Arabia trying to make its mark on global and regional affairs. Led by the young and very brash Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS), this latest move is yet another red line that is being used to rile up nationalists and assert Saudi dominance. Expelling a Canadian ambassador is in keeping with the moves of a crown prince who allegedly took the Lebanese prime minister hostage, rounded up 200 of the most influential and richest Saudis and detained them until they paid part of their fortune back to the Saudi national accounts, and created a diplomatic firestorm with tiny neighbouring Qatar for not toeing the Saudi line on regional affairs. And this in under a year.

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Wisecrack: The Internet Was A Mistake

The Atlantic: The Unmonitored President

However, what that analysis gains in drama it loses in scientific necessity. The essence of “Trumptalk” is something quite ordinary, what linguists call unmonitored language. The kink is that formality, impact, and gravity typically elicit monitored language. Writing is deliberate, allowing us to edit, amend, and correct. The formal statement—as in, to the American public and the world beyond—is typically either read from writing, or even if ad libbed is couched carefully and reflectively in the same air as writing. Unmonitored language is most of the language in the typical person’s life: casual speech, texts, tweets. Humans are genetically specified to use it and none has ever been known to lack it—it comes easily.

Trump takes it easy. It only compounds the pain and embarrassment so many Americans feel when watching spectacles such as his taking a knee before a foreign power accused of harming the U.S. electoral process. It’s bad enough that Trump lacks the substance to care about his job beyond how it impacts his score-keeping sense of ego. What makes it worse is that—in line with his lecturing government leaders on the basis of gut feelings, blithely stepping in front of the Queen, scarfing his Big Macs, and lacking an impulse to even pretend to have any interest in the arts—he is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks. Welcome to the queer circumstance of unmonitored language as officialese. [...]

Or take the fact that in the very tweet in which Trump trumpeted his right to use capitals for emphasis, he told us that “the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake.” Unless Trump intended the liquid connotation, this is a typo, and a rather glaring one—suggesting again a basic lack of attention. Here is a president who is sharing with us without checking it over first. Generously, we might imagine that he uses a spell-check but that even such programs miss misspellings that are other words, such as pour. But this analysis founders upon Trump’s references in other tweets to “unpresidented” acts, such as President Barack Obama daring to “tapp” his phone. Trump clearly is no champion speller—“NO COLUSION” was scrawled on the typescript of his “double negative” script. Many of us aren’t—but we’d make sure nobody knew it if we were president. Trump can’t be bothered.

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Coffee Break: The Art of the Non-Apology

The Economist: The calculations of Muhammad bin Salman

Prince Muhammad has loosened the kingdom’s social restrictions. The decades-old ban on female drivers will be lifted on June 24th. But when citizens demand new rights, instead of waiting patiently to be granted them by royal decree, they are often locked up. The effect has been stifling. Before talking politics over the phone, Saudis take precautions, such as using virtual private networks and encrypted dialling services. Many have purged their Twitter accounts or closed them. “Sorry. I’m not ready to talk,” writes a once-verbose activist. They are all terrified, says a diplomat.

Prince Muhammad sees no contradiction in all this. His social contract apes that of the United Arab Emirates, which grants subjects social freedoms provided they forgo political ones. In less than a year as crown prince, he has taken direct control of media outlets and big businesses, or appointed his men to their boards. Once-powerful clerics and princely challengers have been squashed. Gone is talk of holding elections for the Shura council, a royally appointed proto-parliament. [...]

Western firms, skilled in secret psychological operations, have been hired to help shape public opinion. They include SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data firm that claims to have helped President Donald Trump win election. Before Prince Muhammad’s economic- and social-reform drive, SCL Group, a British firm, conducted dozens of focus groups with ordinary Saudis and found evidence of widespread discontent with the monarchy. It advised the regime on how to stay in power.

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