Trump says "there were very fine people on both sides" at the Charlottesville White nationalists rally, during a Trump Tower press conference. Never mind that one of the largest gatherings of racists in America since the end of the Civil Rights Movement occurred only eight months into Trump’s presidency. Put that aside. Trump’s “both sides” comments on who was to blame for the public street fight in the college town was all anyone needed to understand regarding the thinking of America’s 45th president on the issue of race.

The most overlooked story this year continues to be Trump’s conflicts of interest and the lack of legal mechanisms to protect the executive branch of the federal government from corruption. In 2016, the press — with the exception of Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek — ignored the vast web of global business interests and questionable connections that Trump and his company had and how they might conflict with American foreign policy interests. 

Moore assumed victory and was AWOL much of the time as he sought to avoid human and media contact, while the Jones operation was textbook: well-organized, with a strong get-out-the-vote operation and a homegrown candidate with a creative ad campaign who was constantly on the hustings, moving from town to town, shaking hands and making contact with as many voters as he could.

Trump’s national security adviser-designate Mike Flynn — in consultation with a senior official of the Trump transition team later identified as K. T. McFarland — spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about newly imposed US sanctions for election interference. Flynn’s mission was to persuade Kislyak that the Trump administration would reward Putin for a restrained response, and he succeeded.

The national security functions of government have long been a subject of mystification: The public and the press have a tendency to regard its practitioners as a kind of priesthood possessing an arcane and special knowledge. But long before Trump, the GOP treated it as a political reward for crackpot ideologues whose credentials were thin or nil. Bill Kristol, whose only qualification for anything was being the offspring of Irving Kristol, somehow blossomed in the late 1990s as a Republican national security expert. 

Words. “I have the best words,” Trump famously proclaimed during the campaign, and just the other day he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News how “well-crafted” his goofy tweets are. The same man announced from the White House lawn on Wednesday that “I’m a very intelligent person” — words that sounded more self-deceptive than presidential. Trump does have a way with words. Unfortunately, it’s a gruesome way. 

We have a lot to lose. Trump issued a racist immigration ban based on religion and skin color. He continues to imperil undocumented students and their families. He threatens to cut critical services that many Americans need to live. The AAPI community needs to be worried—Trump’s agenda makes clear that the rights of people of color are secondary to those of his white constituents. 

While I wrote about the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s, my close connection with Ellsberg began only in the 1980s after I became the editor of Nuclear Times magazine. Ellsberg, then (and still) living in the San Francisco area, had started appearing at anti-nuclear protests — the “freeze” campaign was in full swing across the country. Naturally I wanted him to write an essay for the magazine on this subject but I was warned that while he often tried to write articles he “never finishes them.” When he completed a column for us, it drew wide attention as his first published piece in many years.

Of all the myths the Republicans have perpetrated, and there are a lot of them, perhaps none is more powerful or insidious than the foundational one that this is an overwhelmingly conservative country and that progressives are outliers in it, along with its pernicious corollary that conservatives are “real” Americans while liberals (and the minorities who support liberal policies) are somehow counterfeits.

Americans are flat-out prohibited from freely traveling to Cuba like Europeans and Canadians. You can’t just plop down on a golden-sand beach and drink mojitos all day. And individual people-to-people education trips, one of the main ways that Americans previously could visit Cuba, have been scratched. That said, there are 12 categories of travel that still allow Americans to travel to Cuba, including family visits, and group people-to-people travel (including religious and educational trips).