trump-tipping the scales

Tipping the Scales

Noah Feldman

July 19, 2018 Issue

If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal. Kennedy’s successor will be Trump’s second Surpreme Court pick and may not be his last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-five, clearly wishes to stay on the Court as long as Trump is president. So does Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns eighty later this year. But neither is immortal. Especially if Trump is reelected, he could potentially replace both of these justices with staunch young conservatives.

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Brophy | Monday 24 September 2018 - 6:58 pm | | Brophy Blog | No comments

trump-the witch hunters

The ‘Witch Hunters’

Tim Weiner

August 16, 2018 Issue

The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies

by Michael V. Hayden

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James Comey

Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

by James R. Clapper, with Trey Brown

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Robert Mueller, James Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Flynn, and Philip Goldberg at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Washington, D.C., March 2013

1.

To Donald Trump it seems as though the “Deep State” has arisen from the depths of the dismal swamp of Washington to torment him. He sees a cabal of his political enemies—foremost the men who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as a cryptocracy operating under the cover of the constitutionally established government, an immense conspiracy, a dark force seeking to destroy him. The president awakens to tweet thunderbolts against it before Fox & Friends signs on at dawn. (To wit: May 23, 2018, 6:54 AM: “the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam….”)

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Brophy | Monday 24 September 2018 - 6:56 pm | | Brophy Blog | No comments

trump-the singapore sham

Singapore Sham

Jessica T. Mathews

August 16, 2018 Issue

There are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore.

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Brophy | Monday 24 September 2018 - 6:55 pm | | Brophy Blog | No comments