Issue May 13, 2016 - The Week Magazine (2024)

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IN THIS ISSUEEditor’s letterIf you suffer from a compulsion to talk politics with friends, family, and co-workers during the next six months, resist it. The primaries already have fractured the two political parties into feuding factions (see Best U.S. Columns), and now the presidential race will be a death match between two of the most disliked, divisive figures in recent U.S. history. If you dare discuss Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton around the watercooler or at the family picnic, the ensuing argument will likely end in yelling and personal insults. You might even get punched. The passions this campaign will incite will be deep and vehement, and people will not forgive those who collaborated with the enemy. “It is impossible to live at peace,” the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said, “with those…1 min

NEWSTrump completes his GOP takeoverWhat happenedCapping one of the most astonishing stories in modern political history, Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party this week, after a crushing victory in Indiana forced his only remaining rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, to exit the race. The billionaire businessman picked up 53 percent of the vote and all of the available delegates in the Hoosier State primary, which his opponents saw as their last opportunity to deny him the nomination. Trump, who trails likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by double digits in most national polls, called his victory “a beautiful thing to behold” and asked Republicans to unite behind him. Cruz said his campaign “gave it everything we’ve got,” but conceded that “voters chose another path.”Republicans now face the…4 min

NEWSWhat next?“Get ready for the nastiest presidential race you have ever seen,” said Chris Cillizza in WashingtonPost.com. Hampered with “historically low” favorable numbers, both Trump and Clinton know they’ll struggle to convince swing voters to “make an affirmative choice for them.” So instead they’ll do their best to “tear down the other candidate, making him (or her) so unpalatable as to be disqualified.” Neither will be short on ammunition: Clinton’s vulnerabilities include Benghazi, her private email server, and her husband’s infidelity; Trump’s include his attitude toward women, his business failures, and his persistent lying. “Buckle up. This is going to be nasty, brutish, and very, very long.”…1 min

NEWSSanders’ campaign gets much-needed boostWhat happenedSen. Bernie Sanders kept his presidential campaign alive this week with an upset victory in Indiana, though Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton continued her march to the party’s nomination, winning at least 38 of the state’s 83 available delegates. Sanders had campaigned hard in the state, spending $1.8 million on TV ads to Clinton’s zero. After winning 53 percent of the vote, the Vermont senator vowed to take the nomination fight all the way to July’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. “I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States,” he told supporters.Even with the win, Sanders still trails Clinton in pledged delegates, with 1,411 to Clinton’s 1,701. With superdelegates—party leaders who aren’t bound by primary results and can vote…2 min

NEWSIraq protests imperil fight against ISISWhat happenedThe Obama administration’s efforts in Iraq against ISIS suffered a setback this week as political unrest rocked Baghdad’s fragile U.S.-backed government and ISIS-orchestrated terror attacks tore through the capital. Hundreds of followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed Baghdad’s government seat in the fortified Green Zone last week and briefly occupied the parliament. A longtime U.S. adversary, Sadr has led protests aimed at government waste and corruption. Though his followers quickly withdrew from the Green Zone, their protests underscored the dysfunction of the government and the vulnerability of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a key U.S. partner against ISIS. Amid the unrest, three ISIS bombs killed at least 18 people in and around the capital.Near Mosul, a Navy SEAL became the third U.S. serviceman to die in combat since the…2 min

NEWSObama: How will history judge his economic legacy?When President Obama took office in 2008, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times Magazine, the global economy was in free fall. A full-blown financial crisis—the worst since the Great Depression—had left several major U.S. banks close to defaulting, housing prices plummeting, rattled employers shedding 800,000 jobs a month, and a deep recession gripping the country. Eight years later, unemployment has been cut in half, to 5 percent, the annual budget deficit has been reduced by nearly $1 trillion, and the private sector has added 14 million jobs over the longest sustained period of job growth in U.S. history. So why is it, then, that “The Economy Is Terrible” has become the narrative of the 2016 campaign? The answer, President Obama told me in an extended interview, lies…5 min

Issue May 13, 2016 - The Week Magazine (2024)

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