Attention to the Unseen

Masha Gessen writes: Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed the American public sphere. It had been in decline for a while, with the horse-race culture of its political campaigns, the anti-intellectual posture of many of its politicians, and its media’s obsession with entertainment. But Trump has forced the deterioration to new lows. This is true of Trumpism in general: its elements—corruption, xenophobia, isolationism, disdain for the media, denigration of the government, and lack of transparency—are not new phenomena but are,…

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Julia Davis writes: When news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Russian officials and the state media reacted with fiendish delight. Senator Alexei Pushkov, a senior deputy in Russia’s upper-house Federation Council, described the Mueller report as “a mountain that birthed a dead mouse.” Citing Fox News, Russian state news agency TASS reported that the findings represent a…

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Peter Walker writes: MPs have voted to give themselves considerably more control of the Brexit process, starting more or less immediately. They passed by a comfortable 329 to 302 margin an amendment led by the Conservative former minister Sir Oliver Letwin which sets aside Commons business on Wednesday for a series of so-called indicative votes on finding a consensus Brexit solution. Is this a big deal? Potentially. Amid an ever-greater sense of drift and gridlock in Theresa May’s government, MPs…

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Ian Black writes: In mid-February 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, flew to Warsaw for a highly unusual conference. Under the auspices of the US vice-president, Mike Pence, he met the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and two other Gulf states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel. The main item on the agenda was containing Iran. No Palestinians were present. Most of the existing links between Israel and the Gulf have been kept secret…

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Robert Reich writes: As George Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, explained, the first president believed he had been entrusted with something of immense intrinsic worth, and that his duty was to uphold it for its own sake and over the long term. He led by moral example. Few of our subsequent presidents have come close to the example Washington set, but none to date has been as far from that standard as Trump. In the 2016 presidential campaign, when accused…

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Nick Cohen writes: The hundreds of thousands marching were patriots. Not patriots of the flag-waving, chest-beating type, but patriots determined to stop their fellow citizens suffering and a humiliated Britain being torn apart. “Traitors”, “saboteurs”, “citizens of nowhere”, “Remoaners”… The right has deployed the language of civil war for three years. The insults carried with them the threat that dissenters would be treated as enemies within, but also the promise and the hope that, left to its own devices, Brexit…

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Belfast Telegraph reports: Billboard depicting “damning” political quotes have been placed in locations across Northern Ireland by anti-Brexit campaign group Led By Donkeys. The group was formed by four friends in England to highlight what they see as the double standards of politicians on Brexit. The “guerrilla advertising” campaign is designed to embarrass pro-Brexit politicians by using past claims and predictions. In January they erected the first featuring ex-Prime Minister David Cameron’s May 2015 tweet in which he promised “stability…

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