| | | | Trump's Taking the Team Out of Team Trump. That's Dangerous | | | The brief tenure of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State is unprecedented in modern times. That points to a growing problem with the Trump administration: Team Trump isn't acting like a team at all, suggests Jonathan Bernstein for Bloomberg View. And the timing could hardly be worse. "Breaking with history is often good, and it's also true that secretary of state isn't as important a position as it once was. But there's no breaking with an underappreciated aspect of running the executive branch: It takes time for important members to learn to function as a team. That's not happening," Bernstein argues. "There's simply no way that Trump can adequately, say, prepare for a North Korea summit in the midst of all this turmoil. Let alone prepare for that summit, deal with the Russian attack in the U.K., handle the fallout from the newly imposed tariffs, and conduct wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and wherever other Islamic State terrorists are located. And the rest of the foreign affairs and national security agenda. And domestic affairs. Not to mention the continued distraction of the Mueller investigation." "Of course, no president can handle in detail everything that comes along, even presidents whose schedule doesn't feature so much 'executive time.' But Trump is systematically making it increasingly difficult for either his White House or the executive branch departments and agencies to make good decisions in areas of high focus." | | Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania… | | | Democrat Conor Lamb looks poised to secure the slimmest of victories in a congressional district that President Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2016. The key to the extraordinary turnaround? A candidate who could channel Democrats' inner populist, suggests Eric Levitz in New York Magazine. According to one recent analysis, "roughly a quarter of reliable, Democratic voters have opinions on racial and cultural issues that are closer to Donald Trump's than Nancy Pelosi's — they just like 'big government' more than they fear 'illegals'", Levitz notes. "Lamb's strong showing last night would have been impossible without these voters, and he succeeded in winning over a critical mass of them without engaging in dog-whistle demagoguery. Lamb did make some concessions to cultural conservatism, most conspicuously on guns. But he vehemently rejected Republican Rick Saccone's attempts to pin the opioid crisis on immigrants, and ran as a pro-choice, pro-LGBT candidate. Instead of trying to beat the GOP at its culture war game, Lamb worked to make bread-and-butter issues more salient — and succeeded, thanks, in no small part, to the aid of the labor movement." | | Britain Could Do with Some Friends Right Now | | | Britain announced Wednesday it will expel 23 Russian diplomats from the country over the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The trouble for Theresa May as she weighs her options? Britain is feeling very much alone. And Vladimir Putin knows it, the New Statesman editorializes. Britain "is preoccupied by Brexit, a policy that has fractured relations with major European allies and that has imposed great strain on Whitehall. The warning by Remain supporters that Mr Putin would relish a Leave vote has been vindicated." "When Britain voted for Brexit in 2016, some argued that improved relations with the United States would be a positive consequence. But the White House is now occupied by Donald Trump," the New Statesman argues. "The United Kingdom is not impotent: as the world's sixth-largest economy and as one of Europe's major military forces, it has significant resources of hard and soft power. Its security alliances must be nurtured and strengthened. But in a new era of global disorder, as the traditional pillars of its foreign policy crumble, Britain is feeling the chill of isolation." | | Why White Males Are Stockpiling Guns | | | Students across the United States staged walk-outs Wednesday to protest gun violence. They did so against the backdrop of a country that has seen the number of guns being manufactured and imported soar in the past decade. But Jeremy Adam Smith notes in the Scientific American that it's a very specific demographic that is stockpiling arms. "Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile," Smith writes. "These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated…In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes." "Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren't the 'bad guys,' presumably criminals or terrorists. It's themselves—and their families." | | A New Front Opens in the Global Terror Fight | | | A new front is opening up in the global fight against terrorism – and threatening the stability of the Arab world's most populous nation, writes Sudarsan Raghavan in the Washington Post. "Militant groups linked to the Islamic State and al Qaeda are using [Egypt's Western Desert] as both a haven and a crossing point for smuggling fighters, weapons and illicit goods from Libya, where lawlessness rules," Raghavan writes. "Along a highway stretching toward the Libyan border, the winds blow across a vast no man's land of sand dunes, rocky scrubs and barren hills. There are no villages, no signs of life save for the cars and trucks that speed past. But this peaceful landscape, just an hour's drive from Cairo, is the staging ground for an ambitious insurgency." "Ominously, a new group linked to al Qaeda has also emerged in the desert, announcing its presence with an attack in October that killed at least 16 security forces. This group, Ansar al-Islam, is now competing directly with the Islamic State, which had already been active in the Western Desert, introducing a rivalry that could fuel a further uptick in violence." | | The World's Happiest Country Is… | | | Finland is the happiest country in the world, according to the latest edition of the World Happiness Report, which ranks countries based on respondents' assessment of the quality of their current lives. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland round out the top five. "All the top countries tend to have high values for all six of the key variables that have been found to support well-being: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity," the report says. The most notable finding? The strong correlation between the happiness of immigrants and the general population. "The ten happiest countries in the overall rankings also fill ten of the top eleven spots in the ranking of immigrant happiness. Finland is at the top of both rankings in this report, with the happiest immigrants, and the happiest population in general." The United States was the 18th happiest country overall. Burundi, Central African Republic and South Sudan reported the lowest levels of happiness of the 156 nations surveyed. | | | | | | |
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