Family Values
By David Remnick
... Last week, a hunk of Antarctica the size of Delaware, weighing a trillion metric tons, hived off from the Larsen C ice shelf and into the warming seas. Such events now seem almost ordinary—and harbingers of far worse. It is quite possible .. that, should the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet thaw and slip into the ocean, sea levels across the globe could rise as much as seventeen feet. This would have devastating implications for hundreds of millions of people, disrupting food chains, swamping coastal cities, spawning illnesses, sparking mass migrations, and undermining national economies in ways that are impossible to anticipate fully.
Around the time that this event was taking place, Donald Trump, who has lately detached the United States from the Paris climate accord and gone about neutering the Environmental Protection Agency, was prowling the West Wing of the White House, raging Lear-like not about the fate of the Earth, or about the fate of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was dying in captivity, but about the fate of the Trump family enterprise. In particular, he decried the awful injustice visited upon him and his son ... Jr ...
The President argued that his son,"a high-quality person," had been "open, transparent, and innocent." This was a statement as true as many, if not most, of the President’s statements. It was false ...
Still, the President, loyal to nothing and no one but his family, argued that "a lot of people" would have taken that meeting. Leaders of the U.S. intelligence community did not whistle their agreement. They were quick to say that such a meeting was, at best, phenomenally stupid and, at worst, showed a willingness to collude with Moscow to tilt the election. Michael Morell, a former acting director of the C.I.A., told the Cipher Brief, a Web site that covers national-security issues, that Trump, Jr.,’s e-mails are "huge" and indicate that the President’s inner circle knew as early as last June that "the Russians were working on behalf of Trump." In the same article, James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, said that the e-mails were probably "only one anecdote in a much larger story," adding, "I can’t believe that this one exchange represents all there is, either involving the President’s son or others associated with the campaign." Intelligence officials speculated that the tradecraft employed in setting up such a meeting was possibly a way to gauge how receptive the Trump campaign was to even deeper forms of coöperation. In any case, the proper thing to have done would have been to call the F.B.I. Now the country is headed toward a "constitutional crisis," Clapper said, and the question has to be asked:"When will the Republicans collectively say 'enough'?"...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/trump-family-values
