War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Trump Won in a Landslide. →

Nate Silver, writing for FiveThirtyEight:

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway — perhaps seeking to push back on the increasing attention to Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in the national popular vote — has been touting her boss’s margin of victory in the Electoral College. With Trump officially declared the winner in Michigan on Monday, he’s got 306 electoral votes — 56.9 percent of the available total of 538 and nothing to sneeze at. That’s more than George W. Bush got in either of his Electoral College victories, making it the highest total for a Republican since 1988.

Swastiskas on synagogues don’t scare me nearly as much as propaganda like this that Conway is seeking to spread. In the Age of Trump, little lies like these are what we need to be vigilant about dispelling.

Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President →

The New York Times:

“It is uncharted territory, really in the history of the republic, as we have never had a president with such an empire both in the United States and overseas,” said Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council in the administration of George W. Bush, and before that at the Defense Department.

The globe is dotted with such potential conflicts. Mr. Trump’s companies have business operations in at least 20 countries, with a particular focus on the developing world, including outposts in nations like India, Indonesia and Uruguay, according to a New York Times analysis of his presidential campaign financial disclosures. What’s more, the true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Trump boasted again about the global reach of his business — and his family’s ability to keep it running after he takes office.

“I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world,” Mr. Trump said, adding later: “I don’t care about my company. It doesn’t matter. My kids run it.”

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and attention devoted to trying to suss-out what Donald Trump will do in the future. And that’s understandable—he made a lot of grandiose statements, some of which will potentially impact the lives of millions of people. But this conflict of interest stuff regarding his business interests and the Trump brand? I’m going on record here, today, as saying that, if there is a fall from grace for President-Elect Donald J. Trump, it will be because of what is uncovered, or even more likely, because of what is covered-up, regarding where or who he received money from in a business transaction.

Al Capone didn’t go to prison because of the murders, or the booze smuggling, or the racketeering, or the prostitutes. He went to prison because he didn’t pay his taxes.

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency →

David Remnick, writing for The New Yorker:

And Obama related the Party’s losses this year to previous setbacks—and recoveries. “Some of my staff are really young, so they don’t remember this,” Obama said. “They remember my speech from the Boston Convention, in 2004, because they uploaded it on YouTube or something, but they might have been fifteen when it happened. Well, that’s the election that John Kerry lost. George Bush was reëlected. Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, was defeated. The Senate went Republican. The House was Republican. Me and Ken Salazar, of Colorado, were the only two Democrats nationally who won. It was a very similar period to where we are right now. Two years later, Democrats had won back the Senate; I think they had won back the House. And four years later I was the President of the United States.

“So this notion somehow that these irreversible tides have been unleashed, I think, surrenders our agency. It’s easier than us saying, Huh, we missed that, we messed that up, we’ve got to do better in how we organize. We have to stop relying on a narrow targeting of our base turnout strategy if we want to govern. . . . Setting aside the results of this election, Democrats are well positioned to keep winning Presidential elections just by appealing to the base. And, each year, the demographic improves.”

To put it more bluntly than Obama did, the nonwhite percentage of the population will continue to increase. “But we’ll keep on getting gridlock just because of population distribution in this country,” he went on. “As long as California and Wyoming have the same number of senators, there’s going to be a problem—unless we’re able to have a broader conversation and move people who right now aren’t voting for progressive policies and candidates. . . . All of this requires vigilance in protecting gains we’ve made, but a sense, yes, of equanimity, a sense of purposeful calm and optimism, and a sense of humor—sometimes gallows humor after results like the ones we just had. That’s how ultimately the race is won.”

It’s going to take you 45 minutes to read this piece—I saved it specifically for today, Sunday, so that I knew I would have the time—but reading it is the best I’ve felt post-election.

When a Populist Demagogue Takes Power →

Adrian Chen, writing for The New Yorker:

In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos, a young provincial senator, won the Presidency of the Philippines with the pledge “This nation can be great again.” Marcos appeared to have the will necessary to reduce the influence of the colonial élite. He was viewed as a technocrat, but he merely replaced the old oligarchy with his own friends and relatives, including his glamorous wife, Imelda. Over time, his family amassed a fortune of up to ten billion dollars. In 1972, during his second term, Marcos declared martial law, citing Communist and Muslim insurgencies. Marcos’s closest advisers, who were known as the Rolex 12, for the wristwatches that he supposedly gave them, rounded up and tortured the regime’s political rivals.

Sound familiar?

Mississippi Governor Decries Billboard by Artist-Led Super PAC →

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"Political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country." - President-Elect Donald J. Trump

/via Hyperallergic

Bryant Park: A Memoir →

Hilary Mantel, writing for The New Yorker:

There are some women who, the moment they have conceived a child, are aware of it—just as you sense if you’re being watched or followed. I have never had a child, but once in my life, a long time back and for a single day, I thought I was pregnant. I was twenty-three years old, three years a wife. I had no plans at that stage for a child. But my predictable cycle had gone askew, and one morning I felt as if some activity had commenced behind my ribs. It wasn’t breathing, or digestion, or the thudding of my heart.

I’ll be honest—I’m growing a bit numb to reading what is essentially the same alarmist, predictive article that those opposed to a Trump presidency have been writing as of late. And so I approached this collection of “sixteen writers on Trump’s America” with trepidation, literary firepower notwithstanding. Mantel’s piece takes a different approach, though, and because of that, it becomes something pretty special.

I'm So Mad About Trump Getting Elected, I'm Going to Do Exactly the Same Stuff, Only More So

Dan Hopper, writing for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

I’m done whining and handwringing about President-Elect Trump. It’s time to take ACTION to defeat him in 2020, by which I mean, doing the exact same stuff I’ve been doing for the last eighteen months, but, like, way more of it.

Yup.

There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter →

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate:

It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities. Trump is now president-elect. Judging from his choices for the transition—figures like immigration hardliner Kris Kobach and white nationalist Stephen Bannon—it’s clear he plans to deliver on those promises.

Whether Trump’s election reveals an “inherent malice” in his voters is irrelevant. What is relevant are the practical outcomes of a Trump presidency.

Since the day after the election, I’ve been, for the most, pushing an ideology that mostly resembles what Bouie dismantles here. I was familiar with his argument/this argument; he made it already on, I believe, Slate’s Trumpcast podcast. I understand what he’s saying and while I don’t think he’s wrong, I don’t think he’s giving enough credence to compartmentalization, and just how far some people will go, or feel they have to go. Again though, as I’ve been quick to point out, my station in life allows me the latitude to worry about compartmentilization. Others don’t have that luxury.

Before the election, many wondered out loud about where the vitriol Trump had released in a certain class of Americans would go after the election. They assumed a Trump defeat. Now that Trump has won, I think it’s still a major question to grapple with.

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo →

Sheri Fink, writing for The New York Times:

In recent interviews, more than two dozen military medical personnel who served or consulted at Guantánamo provided the most detailed account to date of mental health care there. Almost from the start, the shadow of interrogation and mutual suspicion tainted the mission of those treating prisoners. That limited their effectiveness for years to come.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and technicians received little training for the assignment and, they said, felt unprepared to tend to men they were told were “the worst of the worst.” Doctors felt pushed to cross ethical boundaries, and were warned that their actions, at an institution roiled by detainees’ organized resistance, could have political and national security implications.

Rotations lasted only three to nine months, making it difficult to establish rapport. In a field that requires intimacy, the psychiatrists and their teams long used pseudonyms like Major Psych, Dr. Crocodile, Superman and Big Momma, and referred to patients by serial numbers, not names. They frequently had to speak through fences or slits in cell doors, using interpreters who also worked with interrogators.

Wary patients often declined to talk to the mental health teams. (“Detainee refused to interact,” medical records note repeatedly.) At a place so shrouded in secrecy that for years any information learned from a detainee was to be treated as classified, what went on in interrogations “was completely restricted territory,” said Karen Thurman, a Navy commander, now retired, who served as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Guantánamo. “‘How did it go?’” Or “‘Did they hit you?’ We were not allowed to ask that,” she said.

Dr. Rosecrans said she held back on such questions when she was there in 2004, not suspecting abuse and feeling constrained by the prison environment. “From a surgical perspective, you never open up a wound you cannot close,” she said. “Unless you have months, years, to help this person and help them get out of this hole, why would you ever do this?”

Remember this piece when Donald Trump again calls for the return of torture, including waterboarding and “much worse.”

Bloomberg in 2015 on Steve Bannon: 'This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America' →

Joshua Green, writing for Bloomberg:

Breitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had a profound influence on Bannon. When they met, Breitbart was starting his website, after having worked with Drudge and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the Huffington Post. Bannon lent his financial acumen and office space. He marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.

“One of the things I admired about him was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry,’ ” says Bannon. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” With this in mind, he set out to line up investors.

Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.

You’re a Trump supporter. You tell me that I’m overreacting to Trump’s statements at rallies, that it was all bluster and locker room talk, that I should give him a chance—the space—to succeed. I swallow my pride and agree.

Explain to me, then, considering all those facts, what Steve Bannon is doing in the White House.