Attention to the Unseen

Susan B. Glasser writes: When Walter Mondale, the former Vice-President, died on Monday, C-span circulated a video clip of him on the rostrum of the House of Representatives, from January 6, 1981. It is a remarkable visual snippet of a lost Washington. Mondale and President Jimmy Carter had just been defeated in a landslide by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, receiving only forty-nine Electoral College votes to the Republicans’ four hundred and eighty-nine. The video shows Mondale dutifully…

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David Brooks writes: Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks. It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man…

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The New York Times reports: Two days after supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, but failed to reverse his election defeat, a defiant shout sounded from across the ocean. Tommy Robinson, Britain’s loudest amplifier of anti-Islam, far-right anger, insisted the fight was not over. “You need to pick yourselves back up,” Mr. Robinson said in an online video viewed tens of thousands of times. “As Donald Trump says, it’s only just beginning.” A former soccer…

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Ronald Brownstein writes: The last election’s most unexpected twist is framing one of the most urgent questions confronting both parties today: What explains Donald Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters? The president who began his first national campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” drug smugglers, and criminals; who labored to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border; who separated undocumented children from their parents; who sought in court to end the “Dreamers” program; who maneuvered to reduce virtually every form of…

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Robert Draper writes: The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of…

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Anne Applebaum writes: When Alexei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow on January 17, he turned his life into a metaphor. He knew it, his wife knew it, and everybody else on the plane knew it. So did the millions of people who had watched his documentary videos, who had seen the witty interviews he did on the plane, who have since joined demonstrations in his name. So did the leaders of Russia, including the country’s dictator and president, Vladimir…

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Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin warned the West on Wednesday not to cross Russia’s “red lines”, saying Moscow would respond swiftly and harshly to any provocations and those responsible would regret it. At a time of acute crisis in ties with the United States and Europe, with Russian troops massed near Ukraine and opposition leader Alexei Navalny on hunger strike in jail, the Kremlin leader used his state of the nation speech to project a message of Russian strength and…

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