Attention to the Unseen

The Daily Beast reports: For Donald Trump, the initial plan seemed simple. By agreeing to an exclusive town hall in New Hampshire with his biggest cable news nemesis—CNN—the 2024 Republican frontrunner was poised for a made-for-primetime clash to delight his followers, set off his critics, and suck up the political oxygen in the critical early primary state. Just over 24 hours before Trump’s scheduled sit-down, however, whatever hopes he had to ambush CNN turned into what one of his former…

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Ronald Brownstein writes: Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans proliferating in schools across the country, explicitly linking them to restrictions on abortion and voting rights to make the case that “MAGA extremists” are threatening Americans’ “personal freedom,” as Biden said in the recent video announcing his campaign…

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David Frum writes: I argued recently that political fundamentals point to a strong Biden reelection in 2024: The economy is growing, employment is rising, and Republican culture-warring is alienating crucial groups of voters. But big trends can be punctuated by unexpected events—the X factors that bump history off its predicted course. The 2016 election cycle was dominated by two important last-minute shocks: Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood recording and FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening an investigation into…

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Michelle Goldberg writes: Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny. “When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an…

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The New York Times reports: To mark the 20th anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, stood in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and sought to exorcise the ghosts of the prewar intelligence failures that haunt the building to this day. Addressing some 100 C.I.A. officials on March 19, Mr. Burns acknowledged how the agency catastrophically blundered in its assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he noted,…

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Victor Gilinsky writes: The Israeli protests against its new right-wing government have now touched on Israel’s nuclear weapons. To underline what is at stake, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak cast aside Israeli ambiguity over whether it possesses nuclear weapons to warn his compatriots that Western diplomats are worried that a Jewish messianic dictatorship could gain control over Israel’s nuclear weapons. One thing we can be sure of is that the United States was not officially represented among those Western…

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The New York Times reports: Arab nations agreed on Sunday to allow Syria to rejoin the Arab League, taking a crucial step toward ending the country’s international ostracism more than a decade after it was suspended from the group over its use of ruthless force against its own people. When Syria’s neighbors and peers ejected it from the 22-member league in November 2011, months after its Arab Spring uprising began, the move was seen as a key condemnation of a…

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