Category: Politics

The ‘Amateur Diplomat’

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Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group, killing or maiming thousands of its operatives. Witkoff located the gadget amid a tangle of electronics he uses to communicate abroad in his role as America’s shadow secretary of state. The…

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Just Don’t Call Her Unqualified

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Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one. Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five. Even compared with other right-wing TV personalities, Pirro’s record of unwavering Trump support, including at his…

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Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

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The intensely hostile letter that Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent to the leadership of Harvard yesterday has a lot going on. But the most notable thing about it is what it leaves out. To hear McMahon tell it, Harvard is a university on the verge of ruin. (I say McMahon because her signature is at the bottom of the letter, but portions of the document are written in such a distinctive idiolect—“Why is there so much HATE?” the letter asks; it signs off with “Thank you for your attention to…

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Is Anthony Weiner Ready to Go Another Round?

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The last time we saw him, we saw all of him. Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he…

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Read The Atlantic’s Interview With Donald Trump

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Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s related cover story, “‘I Run the Country and the World.’” On Thursday, April 24, I joined my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer in the White House to interview President Donald Trump. The story behind this meeting is a strange one, told in their new Atlantic cover story, which you can read here. Ashley and Michael had been seeking an Oval Office meeting for some time. It had been scheduled, then angrily unscheduled, then followed by an impromptu interview from the president’s cellphone, and then…

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Inside the Fiasco at the National Security Council

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The national security adviser seemed at a loss. It fell to Michael Waltz to explain to handpicked members of his staff this month why the president had ordered their dismissal after a meeting with Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who rose to prominence by making incendiary anti-Muslim claims and who last year shared a video that labeled 9/11 an “inside job.” “He was upset and couldn’t explain it,” a person familiar with Waltz’s reaction told me. But the abrupt dismissals shouldn’t have come as a surprise at the National Security…

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