Slate Voice

Because countries are not people, it’s tricky to translate whatever “loving one’s country” means—it’s quite abstract—into the language of heartbreak. It sounds melodramatic. What can heartbreak mean as a civic matter? And yet it is what I feel. A corrupt but weak president—this has been my comfort, his weakness—has been given a gift that will make him strong.

ASPEN, Colorado—The “intellectual dark web” came to the sunny slopes of Aspen on Tuesday night, when New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss interviewed Jordan Peterson, the popular and provocative University of Toronto psychologist, who has built a best-selling brand on the idea that his ideas about gender and politics are being silenced by mainstream critics.

Fifty years ago this summer, the collapse of this country seemed not only plausible, but imminent. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, touching off a series of riots across the country that led to dozens of deaths, thousands of arrests, and the razing of large swaths of major cities. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was murdered in the middle of a presidential campaign.

When Sen. Cory Booker wanted to convey the progressive potential of Ben Jealous’ campaign for Maryland governor, he didn’t invoke Barack Obama or even Bernie Sanders. “I think he’s going to energize this country,” Booker said at a rally for Jealous earlier this month. “He is really like a Stacey Abrams right now, which really can spark the moral imagination of this country to who we can be when we come together.

On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen pushed through an amendment to an appropriations measure that would force the State Department to reveal travel ban numbers it has previously kept secret. Slate spoke to Van Hollen about his amendment, the imminent Supreme Court decision on the travel ban, and his recent trip to the Mexican border to visit families that had been split by Trump’s since reversed child separation policy.

On Wednesday’s Trumpcast, Jacob Weisberg spoke with Erik Hanshew, assistant federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, about the family separations along the U.S.–Mexico border. After the families’ arrest, the adults are taken into custody for federal criminal prosecution, which is where Hanshew and his office come in to provide counsel. The children are taken into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Under massive public pressure—from his opponents, from his party, from the world—Trump has signed an executive order ending his own administration’s new policy of taking children away from their parents at the border. This is a crucial juncture: Telling this story correctly will require enormous care. In abusive relationships, abusers know how grateful people feel when the suffering they’ve inflicted stops.

A doctor on the television is saying that locking children up in cages away from their parents could be considered child abuse. It is strange to hear this being spelled out—it’s like a herpetologist popping up in your kitchen to shout that rattlesnakes aren’t toys. You never thought they were, but the obvious is being asserted with desperation, afraid that it won’t be believed. It is bad to rip children from their mothers and fathers, the doctor says. Really.

Stephen Miller has always liked to provoke. Before he was a White House adviser, Miller was a teenage provocateur devoting his time and talents to “trolling” his ideological foes. He brought that same ethos to the Trump administration, delighting in the outrage accompanying his travel ban and his push against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, indifferent to the human cost of his favored policies.

President Trump and his attorneys used to demand a high standard for proving collusion. Words alone, they argued, weren’t enough. Trump and his aides might have met secretly with Russians, solicited campaign help, received campaign help, and done favors for Russia. But without proof that all these words and deeds were connected, they insisted, there was no basis for investigation. We can now junk that argument, because Trump and his lawyers have shown they don’t believe it.

Was the FBI biased against Donald Trump in 2016? Trump and his supporters think so, and now they have fresh evidence: a 500-page report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general. The report includes text messages in which two then-FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, spoke of “stopping” Trump.

As a purely descriptive matter, it’s surely true: We are all going numb. As Donald Trump makes war with Canada and peace with dictators and human rights abusers, the narrative is that everyone’s lost all feeling. Polls show the public believes that Trump paid off a porn star, and they don’t care. They believe that he lies habitually, and they also don’t care.

At the press conference following his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on Tuesday, President Trump called himself “an emissary of the American people” and spoke of “my instinct, my ability or talent” for negotiation. “My whole life has been deals,” said Trump. “I’ve done great at it.” Trump is indeed a skilled salesman, and his presentation of the new U.S.-North Korean denuclearization agreement is a fine sales job.

In comments made to GOP donors last week, former Republican presidential candidate and Utah’s likely next senator Mitt Romney predicted that President Trump is likely to win re-election in 2020. “I think President Trump will be renominated by my party easily, and I think he’ll be re-elected solidly,” he told the audience at his E2 political summit.

Though American voters have managed not to elect more populist right-wing businessmen with legal trouble so far this year, the same may soon not be true in its neighbor to the north. In Thursday’s Ontario elections, Doug Ford, brother of infamous Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, could become the second-most powerful politician in Canada.

Last weekend, the New York Times published a long letter that was sent by President Donald Trump’s lawyers to special counsel Robert Mueller in January. The letter argued that Trump shouldn’t have to give an interview to Mueller’s investigators, in part because the president is entitled to pardon anyone, fire anyone, or shut down any investigation for any reason. But beneath these imperial claims, the letter inadvertently substantiates much of the case against Trump.

A little over three months ago, the delegates of the California Democratic Party declined to endorse five-term incumbent Dianne Feinstein for re-election. They instead came just shy of endorsing Kevin de León, her progressive challenger and the leader of the state Senate’s Democrats.

The Enlightenment is having a renaissance, of sorts. A handful of centrist and conservative writers have reclaimed the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement as a response to nationalism and ethnic prejudice on the right and relativism and “identity politics” on the left.

NEWPORT BEACH, California—Last month, at a politically themed chili cook-off in Huntington Beach, Sandy Metcalf’s manila folder went missing. The folder contained copies of documents alleging Hans Keirstead, a neuroscientist running for Congress in California’s 48th District, had slept with his graduate students and, in one case, had punched one of them in a boozy incident following a concert.

NEWPORT BEACH, California—The House race in California’s 48th congressional district was supposed to be like so many others this year: An upscale, suburban, traditionally Republican suburb that had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, where Democrats would target a longtime and suddenly vulnerable incumbent. After 30 years in the House, Rep.