Attention to the Unseen

Fintan O’Toole writes: It seems rather apt that Boris Johnson pocketed a huge advance from a publisher for a book about William Shakespeare but never got round to writing it. Johnson’s rise and fall hovers between cheap farce and theatre of the absurd. It has none of the grandeur of tragedy. The only line of Shakespeare’s that came to mind at his political demise was the first bit of Mark Antony’s elegy for Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do…

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Stephen Collinson writes: Britain’s Conservatives just did what America’s Republicans never dared to do. They toppled a wrecking ball right-wing populist leader who reeled from one self-created scandal to another and who was accused of flagrantly breaking the law, abusing power and building his political career on an edifice of lies. After weeks of clinging desperately to office, Boris Johnson finally resigned as the ruling Conservative Party’s leader Thursday after a rebellion by his own lawmakers. The party will elect…

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Barton Gellman writes: Michael Flynn faced the camera with brow creased and lips compressed. He hadn’t been born yesterday, his expression said. He was not going to fall for trick questions. “General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified?” Representative Liz Cheney asked him in a video teleconference deposition for the January 6 committee. Flynn’s lawyer pressed the mute button and switched off the camera. Ninety-six seconds passed. Flynn and the lawyer reappeared with a request…

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The Guardian reports: Boris Johnson’s downfall has been met with delight and ridicule in Moscow, while officials in Kyiv expressed sadness at the resignation of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s key ally, which is likely to lead to fears for what it will mean for Ukraine’s war effort. Johnson, who championed weapons transfers to Ukraine in the early stages of the war and was the first world leader to visit Kyiv in April, has emerged as a much-loved figure in Ukraine, but his…

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Ryan Cooper writes: President Biden’s approval rating just keeps sinking and sinking—down to a low of just 39 percent in the FiveThirtyEight poll average, or about three points below where Donald Trump was at a similar point in his term. Unlike Trump, Biden’s poor numbers are mainly thanks to weak support among his own base. Where Trump commanded virtual lockstep loyalty among Republicans, Biden is staggeringly unpopular among wide swaths of Democrats—particularly young folks. Americans aged 18–29 have gone from…

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Mark Leibovich writes: I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to “Make America Great Again” in 1980. Trump said and did…

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The New York Times reports: Among tax lawyers, the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the I.R.S. is known, only partly jokingly, as “an autopsy without the benefit of death.” The odds of being selected for that audit in any given year are tiny — out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the I.R.S. targeted about 5,000, or roughly one out of 30,600. One of the few who received a bureaucratic letter…

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