The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Georgia on Trump's Mind

The USS <i>Carl Vinson</i> in the South China Sea on April 8 — U.S. Navy via Reuters

How Did the Trump Administration Lose an Aircraft Carrier?

David A. Graham

The White House said the USS Carl Vinson was headed for North Korea as it sailed the opposite direction—the latest example of a communications failure inside the executive branch.

A certain amount of unpredictability is a virtue in foreign policy. When one’s adversaries—and perhaps one’s allies—don’t know precisely what a country will do, it gives that country a little extra power in the relationship. Like all virtues, it turns into a vice when used in excess. Donald Trump, Fred Kaplan recently argued, offers an extreme test of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” the Vietnam-era approach of letting enemies think Nixon might really be insane and do anything.

As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan wrote last week, the hazards of this approach are on display in the latest American standoff with North Korea—a contest between two leaders who delight in bellicose rhetoric and erratic action. “When two leaders each habitually bluster and exaggerate, there’s a higher likelihood of making a catastrophic mistake based on a bad guess,” she wrote, including the threat of nuclear war. Even for those who espouse unpredictability, the presumption is that at least the putative madman has some sense what’s going on, even if no one else does. The point is the appearance of unpredictability, not true chaos.

Mexico’s Revenge

Franklin Foer

By antagonizing the U.S.’s neighbor to the south, Donald Trump has made the classic bully’s error: He has underestimated his victim.

When Donald Trump first made sport of thumping Mexico—when he accused America’s neighbor of exporting rapists and “bad hombres,” when he deemed the country such a threat that it should be contained by a wall and so clueless that it could be suckered into paying for its own encasement—its president responded with strange equilibrium. Enrique Peña Nieto treated the humiliation like a meteorological disturbance. Relations with the United States would soon return to normal, if only he grinned his way through the painful episode.

In August, Peña Nieto invited Trump to Mexico City, based on the then-contrarian notion that Trump might actually become president. Instead of branding Trump a toxic threat to Mexico’s well-being, he lavished the Republican nominee with legitimacy. Peña Nieto paid a severe, perhaps mortal, reputational cost for his magnanimity. Before the meeting, former President Vicente Fox had warned Peña Nieto that if he went soft on Trump, history would remember him as a “traitor.” In the months following the meeting, his approval rating plummeted, falling as low as 12 percent in one poll—which put his popularity on par with Trump’s own popularity among Mexicans. The political lesson was clear enough: No Mexican leader could abide Trump’s imprecations and hope to thrive. Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly.

How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump

Caitlin Flanagan

Sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug.

A month after the election, Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, published an op‑ed in The New York Times that sought to position himself and his show as instruments of healing in a broken land. It was called “Let’s Not Be Divided, Divided People Are Easier to Rule,” and it zapped around progressives’ inboxes and Facebook feeds like a digital balm of Gilead. It was a reminder that we were not, in those fevered early weeks, being our best selves: “Instead of speaking in measured tones about what unites us, we are screaming at each other about what divides us.” How true that was, and—one might churlishly observe—what a sea change from Noah’s tone during the campaign, when he berated the Republican candidate for tweeting with “those fat little tiny fingers of yours” and for trying to think with “that stupid head,” and when he advised the candidate that “maybe you should look in the mirror, asshole.”

Illustration: Trump straddles a crumbling canyon dividing isolationism—watch towers and barbed wire fences—and antagonism—armored tanks and other military vehicles. — Sachin Teng

The Brilliant Incoherence of Trump’s Foreign Policy

Stephen Sestanovich

The United States periodically debates whether to do more or less abroad. Trump won by promising both. But he can’t possibly deliver.

Every 20 years or so—the regularity is a little astonishing—Americans hold a serious debate about their place in the world. What, they ask, is going wrong? And how can it be fixed? The discussion, moreover, almost always starts the same way. Having extricated itself with some success from a costly war, the United States then embraces a scaled-down foreign policy, the better to avoid overcommitment. But when unexpected challenges arise, people start asking whether the new, more limited strategy is robust enough. Politicians and policy makers, scholars and experts, journalists and pundits, the public at large, even representatives of other governments (both friendly and less friendly) all take part in the back-and-forth. They want to know whether America, despite its decision to do less, should go back to doing more—and whether it can.

How Trump's First 100 Days Could End in a Government Shutdown

Russell Berman

The historical marker on April 29 will coincide with the expiration of federal funding unless Congress can strike a bipartisan deal in time.

On April 29, President Trump hopes to be commemorating his 100th day in office by touting his successful appointment of a Supreme Court justice and his quick victories in rolling back the Obama-era regulatory regime. But if Congress does not strike the first truly bipartisan deal of his presidency by then, Trump will instead spend his 100th day explaining to the public why the government he’s charged with running has partially shut down.

Federal funding for most departments runs out on April 28, and House and Senate staffers are using the ongoing two-week congressional recess to negotiate a spending bill that would cover the final five months of the fiscal year. Despite their minority status in Washington, Democrats are feeling bullish about the talks, and the 100-day marker is a big reason why. Still reeling from their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republican leaders have little appetite for an all-out brawl that could result in a shutdown at a time when they are trying to prove to their constituents they can effectively run the country.

Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump’s Skin

Chris Jones

Comedy and tragedy in an age of political chaos

点击这里阅读中文版本 | Read this article in Chinese.

Alec Baldwin collapses onto his dressing-room couch at Saturday Night Live like a man participating too enthusiastically in a trust fall. He is 58 years old. He has three children under 4. He has been dividing what’s left of his time between filming a movie with Emilio Estevez in Cincinnati and answering the call from NBC whenever it comes, which, because of his now-signature portrayal of Donald Trump, has been many weeks this season. His appearances gather eyes like car accidents; some clips have been watched on YouTube more than 20 million times. Those legions of viewers have formed a kind of makeshift resistance, a community of the gaslit, together feeling a little less crazy for knowing that at least Alec Baldwin can see what they are seeing. Turning the president into a running joke might prove the most consequential work of his career. It’s at least been the most consuming.

A Divided Georgia District Braces for a Runoff as Jon Ossoff Falls Short

Clare Foran

The Democratic challenger had a strong showing in a conservative district on Tuesday, but failed to earn enough votes to prevent another contest in June against Republican Karen Handel.

Updated on April 19, 2017 at 7:00 a.m. ET

In a blow to liberals hoping that grassroots anger at President Trump will help Democrats win back Congress, Jon Ossoff, a Democratic candidate in a Georgia special election that has drawn national attention, fell just short on Tuesday of winning outright in the race to replace former Republican Representative Tom Price.

The race isn’t over yet: It will now advance to a June runoff between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. Though Ossoff put in a strong showing in a conservative district, winning 48 percent of the vote, his chances of defeating Handel, who won 20 percent of the vote, in a runoff are lower with the GOP field less divided. The seat was vacated by Price, who won reelection by more than 20 points in 2016, after he left to become President Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

A woman climbs a set of stairs. — Toru Hanai / Reuters

How Office Culture Can Crush Women’s Ambitions

Bourree Lam

Women often report less interest in senior roles. But that may be because of how they're treated, not a lack of motivation.

Researchers have long been looking for solutions to what could be called the ambition gap. That’s the nagging discrepancy which often shows up in polling, where women express less interest in becoming senior executives than their male counterparts. It’s a frustrating dilemma, and one without simple answers.

Encouragingly, companies are starting to investigate the problem and what can be done about it. But at least part of the problem, it seems, is companies themselves.

A new report from the consulting firm Boston Consulting Group investigates why women seem more reticent to compete for top jobs. The researchers looked at survey data of over 200,000 respondents from a wide range of companies, industries, age groups, and family statuses, with employees in nearly 200 countries. In their data, they found that women’s desires to reach the top ranks at work primarily varies by company, rather than by family status, as commonly thought.

The Saga of North Carolina’s Contaminated Water

Alana Semuels

The state’s GOP leadership tried to make the state more business-friendly. Now residents are saying their water isn’t safe to drink.

The Trump administration has not been shy about its skepticism of programs designed to protect the environment. Donald Trump has said that environmental regulations are “out of control,” he has proposed slashing the budget and staffing levels at the Environmental Protection Agency, and he has appointed as head of that agency Scott Pruitt, who has spent a career repeatedly backing business over regulators. Last month, Trump signed an executive order aimed at reversing a signature Obama-era climate policy, the Clean Power Plan.

In North Carolina, the state government has taken a similar approach to its own environmental regulatory agency over the past few years. I went there to see how the state’s regulatory rollback is playing out so far.

A Walmart employee stocks rolls of paper towels on a shelf. — Mike Blake / Reuters

The Silent Crisis of Retail Employment

Derek Thompson

What to do when department-store jobs—or mining and manufacturing jobs—go away

Brick-and-mortar retail is having a meltdown, and economists are starting to see the effects in the job market.

Overall retail employment has fallen every month this year. Department stores, including Macy’s and JC Penney, have shed nearly 100,000 jobs since October—more than the total number of coal miners or steel workers currently employed in the U.S. Even America’s richest areas are getting hit: Employment in New York City clothing stores has fallen three years in a row, the longest period of decline on record, going back to the early 1990s.

When some industries lose workers, they win the consolation prize of empty political promises to turn back time. During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton went up and down Appalachia—and far beyond—to lament the job losses suffered by manufacturers and miners. The loss of these jobs has been devastating to many cities and towns. But department stores have lost 18 times more workers than coal mining since 2001.