Year in Review: Milestones for Women in Space Through 2019 – News18

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On April 10, 2019, a tweet went viral showing computer scientist Katie Bouman and her look of delightful surprise. Bouman was at the helm of the team that developed an algorithm that stitched together images to give the world a very first look at a black hole. The rest is history, still in the making.

Bouman, a graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL), is an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Boumans work with the Event Horizon Telescope team and her own CHIRP algorithm, which stands for Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors, was pivotal in the breakthrough that helped create the image of a black hole intergalactic dying stars that many scientists before her deemed impossible to photograph by virtue of their properties. Bouman and her team, had other ideas.

It is this that underlines the grand narrative of women and their roles in space research and astrophysics. The achievement solidified Bouman as a role model in a field that has been typically male dominated for long. Her work and achievements also pay homage to women in space, and their myriad contributions that have helped mankind understand science beyond the times.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

Boumans work came right on the back of NASA astronaut Christina Kochs arrival at the International Space Station (ISS). Soon after her arrival, NASA made a milestone announcement by extending Kochs stay aboard the ISS until February 2020. This scheduled her to officially become the longest woman resident in space, wherein she is set to clock 328 days in microgravity. Her stay will come mighty close to the 340 days that fellow NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent at ISS, and her contribution will be instrumental in our understanding of the effects of long term spaceflight in near-zero gravity conditions.

In India, on July 22, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)s historic Chandrayaan-2 mission took off for the moon. While the mission did not complete its objective due to a part-mission failure with the Vikram lander, ISROs Chandrayaan-2 still played a crucial role in progressing Indias position in global space mission. At its helm were the Rocket Women of India, ISROs project director Muthayya Vanitha, and mission director, Ritu Karidhal. Their tumultuous contributions were a part of Mangalyaan Indias Mars mission, Chandrayaan, and Mission Shakti, Indias own anti-satellite missile test. Karidhal and Vanitha became the face of ISROs achievements while Karidhals 22-year stint at ISRO became widely recognised, Vanitha was named as one of the top five scientists to watch by Nature journal.

ISRO mission director Ritu Karidhal.

Back at NASA, Koch set more records later in 2019 when she, along with new ISS resident Jessica Meir, held the first ever all-female spacewalk on October 18. In her post-spacewalk broadcast back to Earth, Koch stated, We're in sort of a new chapter now where we've crossed that line and two women have done it. Now, hopefully, it will become commonplace and it won't even necessarily be something that's a big deal down the road.

Koch and Meirs contribution to our space research was the first of its kind, but aims to make it regular and natural for more women astronauts to follow. It is this that makes the contributions of Bouman, Koch, Meir and all other women in space research right now so important the ultimate goal, after all, is to not have any notion of gender bias around.

The women that made 2019 the year of women in space also pay homage to astrophysicists, engineers and researchers, dating all the way back to the first Apollo mission in 1969. While progress in this field has not been the fastest, it speaks volumes when one considers that during the iconic Apollo 11 mission, the only woman in the entire team was JoAnn H. Morgan, the only woman in the Apollo mission control room, and the first ever female engineer at NASAs Kennedy Space Center. For India, the image of women researchers celebrating post Chandrayaan-2s successful launch will inspire generations to come.

The trail blazed forth by these women have seen their impact already, in the form of NASA renaming the street in front of their Washington, DC headquarters to Hidden Figures Way in honour of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, women who were pivotal to achievements made in the first Space Race era. NASA further announced the Artemis moon mission for 2024, when the first ever woman is slated to set foot on the moon.

Going forward, 2019 will be remembered as the year when women led mankinds charge towards the unexplored frontiers, bringing mankind closer to reaching for the stars.

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Planetary Confusion Why Astronomers Keep Changing What It Means to Be A Planet – Space.com

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This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Christopher Palma, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Students and Teaching Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University

As an astronomer, the question I hear the most is why isn't Pluto a planet anymore? More than 10 years ago, astronomers famously voted to change Pluto's classification. But the question still comes up.

When I am asked directly if I think Pluto is a planet, I tell everyone my answer is no. It all goes back to the origin of the word "planet." It comes from the Greek phrase for "wandering stars." Back in ancient times before the telescope was invented, the mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy called stars "fixed stars" to distinguish them from the seven wanderers that move across the sky in a very specific way. These seven objects are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

When people started using the word "planet," they were referring to those seven objects. Even Earth was not originally called a planet but the Sun and Moon were.

Since people use the word "planet" today to refer to many objects beyond the original seven, it's no surprise we argue about some of them.

Although I am trained as an astronomer and I studied more distant objects like stars and galaxies, I have an interest in the objects in our Solar System because I teach several classes on planetary science.

The word "planet" is used to describe Uranus and Neptune, which were discovered in 1781 and 1846 respectively, because they move in the same way that the other "wandering stars" move. Like Saturn and Jupiter, if you look at them through a telescope, they appear bigger than stars, so they were recognized to be more like planets than stars.

Not long after the discovery of Uranus, astronomers discovered additional wandering objects these were named Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta. At the time they were considered planets, too. Through a telescope they look like pinpoints of light and not disks. With a small telescope, even distant Neptune appears fuzzier than a star. Even though these other, new objects were called planets at first, astronomers thought they needed a different name since they appear more star-like than planet-like.

William Herschel (who discovered Uranus) is often said to have named them "asteroids" which means "star-like," but recently, Clifford Cunningham claimed that the person who coined that name was Charles Burney Jr., a preeminent Greek scholar.

Today, just like the word "planet," we use the word "asteroid" differently. Now it refers to objects that are rocky in composition, mostly found between Mars and Jupiter, mostly irregularly shaped, smaller than planets, but bigger than meteoroids. Most people assume there is a strict definition for what makes an object an asteroid. But there isn't, just like there never was for the word "planet."

In the 1800s the large asteroids were called planets. Students at the time likely learned that the planets were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Juno, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and, eventually, Neptune. Most books today write that asteroids are different than planets, but there is a debate among astronomers about whether the term "asteroid" was originally used to mean a small type of planet, rather than a different type of object altogether.

These days, scientists consider properties of these celestial objects to figure out whether an object is a planet or not. For example, you might say that shape is important; planets should be mostly spherical, while asteroids can be lumpy. As astronomers try to fix these definitions to make them more precise, we then create new problems. If we use roundness as an important distinction for objects, what should we call moons? Should moons be considered planets if they are round and asteroids if they are not round? Or are they somehow different from planets and asteroids altogether?

I would argue we should again look to how the word "moon" came to refer to objects that orbit planets.

When astronomers talk about the Moon of Earth, we capitalize the word "Moon" to indicate that it's a proper name. That is, the Earth's moon has the name, Moon. For much of human history, it was the only Moon known, so there was no need to have a word that referred to one celestial body orbiting another. This changed when Galileo discovered four large objects orbiting Jupiter. These are now called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the moons of Jupiter.

This makes people think the technical definition of moon is a satellite of another object, and so we call lots of objects that orbit Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Ida and a large number of other asteroids moons. When you start to look at the variety of moons, some, like Ganymede and Titan, are larger than Mercury. Some are similar in size to the object they orbit. Some are small and irregularly shaped, and some have odd orbits.

So they are not all just like Earth's Moon. If we try to fix the definition for what is a moon and how that differs from a planet and asteroid, we are likely going to have to reconsider the classification of some of these objects, too. You can argue that Titan has more properties in common with the planets than Pluto does, for example. You can also argue that every single particle in Saturn's rings is an individual moon, which would mean that Saturn has billions upon billions of moons.

The most recent naming challenge astronomers face arose when they discovering planets far from our Solar System orbiting around distant stars. These objects have been called extrasolar planets, exosolar planets or exoplanets.

Astronomers are currently searching for exomoons orbiting exoplanets. Exoplanets are being discovered that have properties unlike the planets in our Solar System, so astronomers have started putting them in categories like "hot Jupiter," "warm Jupiter," "super-Earth" and "mini-Neptune."

Ideas for how planets form also suggest that there are planetary objects that have been flung out of orbit from their parent star. This means there are free-floating planets not orbiting any star. Should planetary objects that are flung out of a solar system also get ejected from the elite club of planets?

When I teach, I end this discussion with a recommendation. Rather than arguing over planet, moon, asteroid and exoplanet, I think we need to do what Herschel and Burney did and coin a new word. For now, I use "world" in my class, but I do not offer a rigorous definition of what makes something a world and what does not. Instead, I tell my students that all of these objects are of interest to study.

A lot of people seem to feel that scientists wronged Pluto by changing its classification. I look at it that Pluto was only originally called a planet because of an accident; scientists were looking for planets beyond Neptune, and when they found Pluto they called it a planet, even though its observable properties should have led them to call it an asteroid.

As our understanding of this object has grown, I feel like the evidence now leads me to call Pluto something besides planet. There are other scientists who disagree, feeling Pluto still should be classified as a planet.

But remember: The Greeks started out calling the Sun a planet given how it moved on the sky. We now know that the properties of the Sun show it to belong in a very different category from the planets; it's a star, not a planet. If we can stop calling the Sun a planet, why can't we do the same to Pluto?

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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Planetary Confusion Why Astronomers Keep Changing What It Means to Be A Planet - Space.com

The billion-year belch – MIT News

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Billions of years ago, in the center of a galaxy cluster far, far away (15 billion light-years, to be exact), a black hole spewed out jets of plasma. As the plasma rushed out of the black hole, it pushed away material, creating two large cavities 180 degrees from each other. In the same way you can calculate the energy of an asteroid impact by the size of its crater, Michael Calzadilla, a graduate student at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI), used the size of these cavities to figure out the power of the black holes outburst.

In a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Calzadilla and his coauthors describe the outburst in galaxy cluster SPT-CLJ0528-5300, or SPT-0528 for short. Combining the volume and pressure of the displaced gas with the age of the two cavities, they were able to calculate the total energy of the outburst. At greater than 1054 joules of energy, a force equivalent to about 1038 nuclear bombs, this is the most powerful outburst reported in a distant galaxy cluster. Coauthors of the paper include MKI research scientist Matthew Bayliss and assistant professor of physics Michael McDonald.

The universe is dotted with galaxy clusters, collections of hundreds and even thousands of galaxies that are permeated with hot gas and dark matter. At the center of each cluster is a black hole, which goes through periods of feeding, where it gobbles up plasma from the cluster, followed by periods of explosive outburst, where it shoots out jets of plasma once it has reached its fill. This is an extreme case of the outburst phase, says Calzadilla of their observation of SPT-0528. Even though the outburst happened billions of years ago, before our solar system had even formed, it took around 6.7 billion years for light from the galaxy cluster to travel all the way to Chandra, NASAs X-ray emissions observatory that orbits Earth.

Because galaxy clusters are full of gas, early theories about them predicted that as the gas cooled, the clusters would see high rates of star formation, which need cool gas to form. However, these clusters are not as cool as predicted and, as such, werent producing new stars at the expected rate. Something was preventing the gas from fully cooling. The culprits were supermassive black holes, whose outbursts of plasma keep the gas in galaxy clusters too warm for rapid star formation.

The recorded outburst in SPT-0528 has another peculiarity that sets it apart from other black hole outbursts. Its unnecessarily large. Astronomers think of the process of gas cooling and hot gas release from black holes as an equilibrium that keeps the temperature in the galaxy cluster which hovers around 18 million degrees Fahrenheit stable. Its like a thermostat, says McDonald. The outburst in SPT-0528, however, is not at equilibrium.

According to Calzadilla, if you look at how much power is released as gas cools onto the black hole versus how much power is contained in the outburst, the outburst is vastly overdoing it. In McDonalds analogy, the outburst in SPT-0528 is a faulty thermostat. Its as if you cooled the air by 2 degrees, and thermostats response was to heat the room by 100 degrees, McDonald explains.

Earlier in 2019, McDonald and colleagues released a paper looking at a different galaxy cluster, one that displays a completely opposite behavior to that of SPT-0528. Instead of an unnecessarily violent outburst, the black hole in this cluster, dubbed Phoenix, isnt able to keep the gas from cooling. Unlike all the other known galaxy clusters, Phoenix is full of young star nurseries, which sets it apart from the majority of galaxy clusters.

With these two galaxy clusters, were really looking at the boundaries of what is possible at the two extremes, McDonald says of SPT-0528 and Phoenix. He and Calzadilla will also characterize the more normal galaxy clusters, in order to understand the evolution of galaxy clusters over cosmic time. To explore this, Calzadilla is characterizing 100 galaxy clusters.

The reason for characterizing such a large collection of galaxy clusters is because each telescope image is capturing the clusters at a specific moment in time, whereas their behaviors are happening over cosmic time. These clusters cover a range of distances and ages, allowing Calzadilla to investigate how the properties of clusters change over cosmic time. These are timescales that are much bigger than a human timescale or what we can observe, explains Calzadilla.

The research is similar to that of a paleontologist trying to reconstruct the evolution of an animal from a sparse fossil record. But, instead of bones, Calzadilla is studying galaxy clusters, ranging from SPT-0528 with its violent plasma outburst on one end to Phoenix with its rapid cooling on the other. Youre looking at different snapshots in time, says Calzadilla. If you build big enough samples of each of those snapshots, you can get a sense how a galaxy cluster evolves.

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Astronomers discover a new exoplanet 66.5 light-years away, making it one of the nearest known to date – MEAWW

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Every new planet found orbiting a distant star opens a world of possibilities for astronomers. And a team of scientists has now discovered a rocky exoplanet -- a little bigger than Earth -- which is among the smallest, nearest exoplanets known to date.

The exoplanet -- implying a planet outside our Solar System -- has been dubbed as GJ 1252 b. It is only 66.5 light-years away, orbiting a red dwarf star GJ 1252, according to researchers from the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, among others.

Here we present the discovery of GJ 1252 b, a small planet orbiting an M dwarf. The planet was initially discovered as a transiting planet candidate using TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data. Based on the TESS data and additional follow-up data, we are able to reject all false positive scenarios, showing it is a real planet. In addition, we were able to obtain a marginal mass measurement, say the researchers in a pre-print version on arXiv, which is operated by Cornell University. The research has also been submitted to the American Astronomical Society.

The Solar System has either small, rocky planets like Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, or much larger planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune that are dominated by gases rather than land, say scientists. The discovery of exoplanets such as GJ 1252 b will enable scientists to better understand the worlds orbiting other stars, as well as study the missing link between rocky Earth-like planets and gas-dominant mini-Neptunes.

The diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light-years, and our galaxy is just one of the millions of galaxies. So, 66.5 light-years imply that it is one of our neighboring stars, say experts. GJ 1252 was observed by camera 2 of the TESS spacecraft during Sector 13, from June 19, 2019, to July 17, 2019.

NASA describes TESS as the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. TESS -- launched on April 18, 2018, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket -- will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets.

According to the scientists, GJ 1252 b joins a small but growing group of small planets orbiting nearby M dwarf stars. It also joins the group of small planets orbiting at very short periods, commonly called ultra-short periods, or USPs. Experts say that USPs orbital period ranges from about one day down to less than 10 hours, and even as short as about 4 hours, especially around M dwarfs. Planets in this group are believed to have undergone photo-evaporation which removed their atmosphere.

GJ 1252 b joins the short but growing list of small planets orbiting bright and nearby stars discovered by TESS that are amenable to detailed characterization. GJ 1252 is one of the closest planet host stars to the Sun to host a planet with a measured radius. GJ 1252s brightness and the short orbital period (0.518 day, or 12.4 hours) make it a potential target for transmission and emission spectroscopy, which can reveal whether or not the planet has an atmosphere, says the team.

The field of exoplanets has come a long way since the first discoveries at the end of the 20th century. One of the current frontiers in the study of exoplanets is that of small planets, smaller than Neptune and Uranus. However, the number of small planets with a well-measured mass is still small, say experts.

The study of small planets is hampered by the lack of small planets orbiting stars that are bright enough for detailed follow-up investigations. The TESS mission is designed to overcome this problem by detecting transiting planet candidates orbiting bright stars positioned across almost the entire sky. So far, 4,104 exoplanets have been confirmed in our galaxy.

Among those, planet candidates orbiting nearby M dwarf stars present a special opportunity, as their typical high proper motion and small size make it easier to rule out false-positive scenarios. This quickly clears the way for follow-up studies, including mass measurement and atmospheric characterization, says the study.

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Astronomers discover a new exoplanet 66.5 light-years away, making it one of the nearest known to date - MEAWW

Will there ever be a supercomputer that can think like HAL? – Macquarie University

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Whether or not Hal will one day refuse to 'open the pod bay doors' IRL will depend on the research goals the field of artificial intelligence (AI) sets for itself.

Supercomputer: HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in the Space Odyssey series.

Currently, the field is not prioritising the goal of developing a flexible, general purpose intelligent system like HAL. Instead, most efforts are focused on building specialised AI systems that perform well often much better than humans in highly restricted domains.

These are the AI systems that power Googles search, Facebooks news feed and Netflixs recommendation engine; answer phones at call centres; translate natural languages from one to another; and even provide medical diagnoses. So the portrait of AI that Stanley Kubrick developed in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, while appropriate for the time (after all, Kubricks film came out in 1968), appears pretty outdated in light of current developments.

That is not to say a superhuman general intelligence like HAL could not be built in principle, although what exactly it would take remains an open scientific question. But from a practical perspective, it seems highly unlikely that anything like HAL will be built in the near future either by academic researchers or industry.

The future of AI is probably more accurately depicted by a toaster that knows when you want to eat breakfast in the morning, than anything resembling a super intelligence like HAL.

Does this mean that artificial intelligence and other related fields like machine learning and computational neuroscience have nothing interesting to offer? Far from it. Its just that the goals have changed.

Artificial intelligence these days is more closely connected to the rapidly growing fields of machine learning, neural networks, and computational neuroscience. Major tech companies like Google and Facebook, among many others, have been investing heavily in these areas in recent years and large in-house AI research groups are quickly becoming the norm.A perfect example of this is Google Brain.

So AI isnt going anywhere, its just being transformed and incorporated into quite literally everything from internet search to self-driving cars to 'intelligent' appliances. The future of AI is probably more accurately depicted by a toaster that knows when you want to eat breakfast in the morning, than anything resembling a super intelligence like HAL.

Virtually everything in the popular media today about AI concerns deep learning. These algorithms work by using statistics to find patterns in data, and they have revolutionised the field of AI in recent years. Despite their immense power and ability to match, and in many cases exceed, human performance on image categorisation and other tasks, there are some things at which humans still excel.

For instance, deep convolutional neural networks must be trained on massive amounts of data, far more than humans require to exhibit comparable performance. Moreover, network training must be supervised in the sense that when the network is learning, each output the network produces for a given input is compared against a stored version of the correct output. The difference between actual and ideal provides an error signal to improve network performance.

Incredible brainpower: AI software has been designed with cognitive abilities similar to those of the human brain, explain Crossley and Kaplan.

And yet humans can learn to do a remarkable variety of things like visually categorise objects and drive cars based on relatively small data sets without explicit supervision. By comparison, a deep neural network might require a training set of millions of images or tens of millions of driving trials, respectively.

The critical question is, how do we do this? Our brains are powerful neural networks shaped by millions of years of evolution to do unsupervised, or better, self-supervised, learning sometimes on the basis of limited data. This is where AI will be informed by ongoing work in the cognitive science and neuroscience of learning.

Cognitive science is the study of how the brain gives rise to the many facets of the mind, including learning, memory, attention, decision making, skilled action, emotion, etc. Cognitive science is therefore inherently interdisciplinary. It draws from biology, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, psychology, among others.

In particular, cognitive science has a long and intimate relationship with computer science and artificial intelligence. The influence between these two fields is bidirectional. AI influences cognitive science by providing new analysis methods and computational frameworks with which neural and psychological phenomena can be crisply described.

Will artificial intelligence ever match or surpass human intelligence on every dimension? At the moment, all we can do is speculate, but a few things seem unambiguously true.

Cognitive science is at the heart of AI in the sense that the very concept of "intelligence" is fundamentally entangled with comparisons to human behaviour, but there are much more tangible instances of cognitive science influencing AI. For instance, the earliest artificial neural nets were created in an attempt to mimic the processing methods of the human brain.

More recent and further advanced artificial neural nets (e.g., deep neural nets) are sometimes deeply grounded in contemporary neuroscience. For instance, the architecture of artificial deep convolutional neural nets (the current state of the art in image classification) is heavily inspired by the architecture of the human visual system.

The spirit of appealing to how the brain does things to improve AI systems remains prevalent in the current AI research (e.g., complimentary learning systems, deep reinforcement learning, training protocols inspired by "memory replay" in the hippocampus), and it is common for modern AI research papers to include a section on biological plausibility that is, how closely matched are the workings of the computational system to what is known about how the brain performs similar tasks.

This all raises an interesting question about the frontiers of cognitive science and AI. The reciprocity between cognitive science and artificial intelligence can be seen even at the final frontier of each discipline. In particular, will cognitive science ever fully understand how the brain implements human cognition, and the corresponding general human intelligence?

And back to our original question about HAL: Will artificial intelligence ever match or surpass human intelligence on every dimension?

At the moment, all we can do is speculate, but a few things seem unambiguously true. The continued pursuit of how the brain implements the mind will yield ever richer computational principles that can inspire novel artificial intelligence approaches. Similarly, ongoing progress in AI will continue to inspire new frameworks for thinking about the wealth of data in cognitive science.

Dr Matthew Crossley is a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University working on category and motor learning. Dr David Kaplan is a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University working on motor learning and the foundations of cognitive science.

Understanding cognition, which includes processes such as attention, perception, memory, reading and language, is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. The new Bachelor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences degree the only one of its kind in Australia provides a strong foundation in the rapidly growing fields of cognitive science, neuroscience and computation.

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Will there ever be a supercomputer that can think like HAL? - Macquarie University

Trump warns Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies against ‘carnage’ in Idlib – CNN

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"Don't do it!" he wrote in a typo-riddled tweet, accusing Russia and Iran along with the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad of "killing, or on their way to killing" the civilians.

He later corrected misspellings in a subsequent tweet.

Trump said Turkey was working to stop the "carnage," which has forced at least 100,000 people from their homes in the northwestern province.

Dozens of people have been killed by a wave of bombardment in the area, according to the White Helmets, a local volunteer search and rescue group.

Assad's army, with support from Russian air power, has stepped up its attacks on Idlib, the country's last major opposition bastion and home to more than 3 million Syrians.

The government has said that it is targeting terrorists in Idlib. But if the violence continues, hundreds of thousands of civilians could be displaced in the coming weeks, international aid organizations warn.

Turkey, an ally of Russia's which Trump praised in his tweet as attempting to curb the offensive, has so far not been able to end the violence.

Instead, the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who Trump has fostered close ties with, has said his country would be unable to accommodate additional refugees fleeing the misery.

Speaking at a press conference in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan said his country, which already shelters the most Syrian refugees in the world, cannot handle a fresh wave of migrants and "will not bear" the burden alone.

It's unclear what prompted Trump's tweet on Thursday. He sent the message from his Florida estate amid a flurry of other angry messages about the ongoing impeachment saga. One included a complaint about his hampered ability to conduct foreign relations.

"Despite all of the great success that our Country has had over the last 3 years, it makes it much more difficult to deal with foreign leaders (and others) when I am having to constantly defend myself against the Do Nothing Democrats & their bogus Impeachment Scam," he wrote. "Bad for USA!"

Trump ventured to his nearby golf club a few hours later.

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Trump warns Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies against 'carnage' in Idlib - CNN

Meet the Americans called Trump … who aren’t related to the president – The Guardian

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On the first day of class each semester, Kris-Stella Trump is sure to tell her students at the University of Memphis one thing about herself: Dr Trump is not related to the president. Its a complete coincidence.

For Kris-Stella, who grew up in Estonia, the need for clarification is not just in the classroom its everywhere. In hotels, restaurants, bars, conferences and the airport.

The questions from strangers are frequent and can lead to awkward interactions. Ive learned to say that [Im not related] in a way that essentially avoids what I think about the president, Kris-Stella said.

As a professor of political science, Kris-Stella is keenly aware of how her last name has affected her life. Its like the polarizing nature of politics follow me around, Kris-Stella said. I spend my life thinking about politics but its another aspect of what would otherwise be a private sphere.

In 2016, Vox reported that there are over 4,700 Trumps in the US almost all unrelated to the president. They come from across the country and different walks of life, but they share a last name that has become synonymous with a divisive age of politics.

A frequent traveler, Ken Trump, a school security expert based in Cleveland, Ohio, has noticed people react differently to his name depending on where he is in America. When he told a school police officer in Texas that his name was Ken Trump, the officer responded: I aint got a problem with that, boy. In Los Angeles, the name can create tenser interactions.

These are daily interactions that have become a part of my life, Ken said. He often says no relation when introducing himself as a fun icebreaker and conversation starter, helping him develop inside jokes with strangers.

When Ken went to Puerto Rico with his children and wife, who is Puerto Rican, the staff members of his hotel told him: This week, so you have a good week in Puerto Rico, youre Mr Rodriguez, citing his wifes maiden name. All week, the staff would jokingly call him Mr Rodriguez whenever he passed by. It was an uplifting part of the experience, he said.

But theres a downside to the last name: Ken has gone to restaurants with his kids when they are are wearing red sweatpants and hoodies part of their sports team attire with their last name emblazoned on the back. Seeing the name Trump on red clothing made peoples heads turn.

Thats why Im comfortable putting the Ken Trump, no relation out there, because its such a polarizing name you remove the intensity of that polarization that we have in this country, he said.

Having the last name Trump once primed jokes about potentially being related to a millionaire. Lindsay Trump, a project manager for a construction company in Orange county, California, used to get questions when she was younger of whether she was related to the publicity-hungry real estate developer and New York gossip circuit fixture. People would always be like, Oh, are you related to Donald Trump? Like, you can have all the money, Lindsay said. Now its like they dont know what to say.

Lindsay can tell people struggle to betray their political beliefs when her name comes up.When people see her in person, she said it is pretty clear that she is unrelated to the president: she is part Hispanic.

I dont obviously look like Im related to him, so I dont think people assume that [I am], Lindsay said.

People assume differently when it comes to Maxine Trump, a documentary film-maker, despite her British accent. Im white, blonde, I live in New York City, Maxine said. The presidents two daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany, are both currently located in Washington but the family has traditionally been associated with living and working in New York, where the Donald was born in the borough of Queens and began working for his father.

Maxine, who was born and raised in the UK, has been getting grief about her last name since she was in elementary school because to trump means to fart in British slang. When I stood up and had to give me last name at school, everyone made farting noises, she said.

When the president entered politics, the questions started to come and have not stopped for Maxine. Like Kris-Stella, Maxine tries to politely answer questions without dragging things into the political arena. This has been going most of my adult life. It used to be fine, and now its always mentioned, she said.

If the conversation continues past the are you related? question, Maxine says she often mentions a documentary she made in 2017 called Trump Against Trumps. The video signals that people who share the last name Trump might not agree with the president.

I say, Actually, I even made a short film about it. You should watch it because I think itd make you chuckle, Maxine said.

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Meet the Americans called Trump ... who aren't related to the president - The Guardian

What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump? – The New York Times

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Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both campaigned for, and won, the White House on the watchword hope. What watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?

My suggestion: soap.

Nearly three years into Donald Trumps presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse. It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled.

Soiled by a president who, Castro-like, delivered a two-hour rant at a rally in Michigan the night he was impeached. Who described his shakedown of Ukraine as perfect. Who extolled the worlds cruelest tyrant as someone who wrote me beautiful letters. We fell in love. Who abandoned vulnerable allies in Syria, then opted to maintain troops in the country only for oil. Who, barely a year before the El Paso massacre, demonized illegal immigrants who pour into and infest our Country.

The list goes on, and most everyone feels it. In June, the Pew Research Center published a survey on how the country sees the state of public discourse. The most striking finding: A 59 percent majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says. About half also say they are at least sometimes embarrassed (53 percent) and confused (47 percent) by Trumps statements.

Whats true of Republicans is far more so of the rest of the United States. Pew found that overwhelming majorities of Americans were concerned (76 percent), confused (70 percent), embarrassed (69 percent), angry (65 percent), insulted (62 percent) and frightened (56 percent) by the things Trump says.

These numbers should devastate Trumps chances of re-election. They dont, for three reasons.

First, 76 percent of Americans rate economic conditions positively, up from 48 percent at the time of Trumps election. Second, the progressive lefts values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowlings recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes dont happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.

No wonder Trumps average approval ratings have steadily ticked up since the end of October. In the view of middle-of-the-road America, the president may be bad, but hes nowhere near as bad as his critics say.

In that same view, while Trumps critics might be partly right about him, theyre a lot less right than they believe. In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.

How to avoid that outcome?

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate,national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britains hapless Jeremy Corbyn.

What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.

What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trumps most potent re-election argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, hes running against the crazy left.

Hence the second point. Too much of todays left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they wont vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October over cancel culture, is the one likeliest to beat Trump.

Finally, the winning Democrat will need to make Trumps presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it. Mike Bloomberg has the financial wherewithal to make Trumps wealth seem nearly trivial. Joe Biden has the life experience to make Trumps attacks seem petty. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have the rhetorical skills to turn Trumps taunts against him.

As with most bullies, the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is. Wouldnt it be something if his political opponents and obsessed media critics resolved, for 2020, to talk about him a little less and past him a lot more?

When your goal is to wash your hands of something bad, you dont need a sword. Soap will do.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump? - The New York Times

Donald Trump’s 199 wildest lines of 2019 – CNN

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Over the past year, President Donald Trump has talked and talked and talked. He has talked at photo ops at the White House. He has talked at impromptu press conferences while abroad. He has talked at campaign event after campaign event.

And I have watched or read it all -- poring over the transcripts to find the most, um, notable quotes. Below, we've gathered the best of the best -- or worst of the worst, depending on your point of view -- lines of 2019.

The President celebrated the new year with a 90+ minute Cabinet meeting -- and cameras were rolling the entire time. He answered question after question as his Cabinet sat silently.

The President of the United States offers his thoughts on Syria.

This is so revealing. All of life is a casting call for Trump. These generals were good because they were good looking and strong. Even more than Tom Cruise!

"Computer boards."

"Computer boards."

Is that how that goes? The buck stops with everybody? (Remember: Trump hardly ever takes the blame for anything -- especially the things that are his fault.)

11. "I was obviously a good candidate. I won every debate. I won everything I did, and I won, and I won easily."

When Trump said this, the 2016 election had ended 797 days ago.

Trump's response here to a question on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg following her illness was -- dare I say it -- presidential.

Trump on the global situation: America 🙂 Rest of world 🙁

"The Pocahontas Trap?" Is that a Disney flick?

In this quote from Trump's interview on CBS News before this year's Super Bowl, Trump questioned his intelligence community's assessment of Iran. Worth nothing: His "intelligence people" didn't say Iran was a kindergarten, they simply said they believed the country to be in compliance with the nuclear deal Trump pulled out of in May 2018.

The Mueller report hadn't come out yet.

Donald Trump on North Korea. Yup!

Donald Trump and Texas sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love then comes ... ah, you know the rest.

There's so much here. First, Trump was comparing his rally to the Academy Awards because of the amount of press that was covering it. (But I thought he hated the media?) Then he's saying that the Oscars, like everything else, aren't as good as they used to be. And finally, he is attributing the decline of the Oscars to the fact that some of the actors have taken shots at him. He truly contains multitudes.

This an unedited "sentence" from the President of the United States. Someday.

When a protester interrupts a speech, that's when Trump's real bullying tendencies emerge.

Remember: Trump views himself as an entertainer first and everything else second. So his measure of success is whether people are having fun.

Oh, that is rich. Important note: Donald Trump made over 8,000 false or misleading claims in his first two years in office, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker. By October 2019, that number had risen to 13,435.

Trump has already said, repeatedly, that "Keep America Great" is his preferred 2020 slogan. Also, he's been running for a second term since the day he won in 2016.

In which Donald Trump claims to have invented the word "caravan."

Yup. He said this.

Words fail.

This is not edited. He really said these sentences back-to-back.

So, the President was declaring a national emergency on the southern US border because "we have to do it," not because he said we had to do it on the campaign trail. But ask yourself this: If it was such an emergency, why did Trump wait more than two years into his term to declare it one?

Important thing to always remember about Trump: Nothing is ever his fault. He is always the undeserving victim of other peoples' malice, incompetence or both.

(Trump while taking questions). ABC > NBC. But, IT'S CLOSE!

"Now I do politics." -- The President of the United States

Wait, so former President Barack Obama told Trump he was planning a "big" war against North Korea? Interesting! I am sure that conversation happened exactly as Trump said it did!

Ah, those rich -- and dusty -- days. Man, they were great. Tough on the allergies. But great.

It IS true. Voters seemed to believe that Trump's often rambling, hard-to-understand speeches.

"When the wind stop blowing, that's the end of your electric." -- The President of the United States. (Also, Trump is mocking the "Green New Deal" here.)

Trump has even turned his infamous love for cursing into some sort of anti-elites mantra. Amazing.

I assume Trump is referring to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russia probe. Or maybe former FBI Director James Comey for launching the probe. Or deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for forming a special counsel to look into it. Maybe all of the above. Either way: It's total bullshit!

Agreed. How else does anyone watch "Succession?" (Also, Trump may have gotten a *little* off-topic during his CPAC speech.)

Trump is talking about why he is speaking for so long and so far off-script. It's because of love, obviously.

From good to great in two sentences: The life of Donald Trump.

Trump was in Iraq to meet with generals. His first thought? Bring in the cameras. Let's make a movie.

So, Trump is saying he deserves credit for the 2018 midterm election! The same 2018 election in which Republicans suffered a near-total loss: Democrats made a net gain of 39 seats in the House, picked up 7 governor's mansions and hundreds of seats in state legislatures across the country.

Republicans DID win the Senate, and those 32 "big, fat rallies" probably helped -- but with 26 Democratic seats up for reelection and only nine for Republicans, the 2018 Senate map was one that Republicans should have capitalized on -- not just survived.

He is totally and completely obsessed with crowds. And crowds staying. And loving him. This feels like a good place to end the CPAC portion of our tour.

So, if Trump wasn't president, we would be running on wind power right now? Also, he's right -- the wind does "only blow sometimes."

So, if Hillary Clinton was president right now, we'd have no oil or gas. Just wind. And you know the wind "only blows sometimes."

Why did Trump suddenly out of nowhere start talking about his potential 2020 opponents? Oh, I have no idea. But the crowd LOVED it.

It's fascinating that Trump understands the job of being president as getting lots of people to show up to rallies.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States! Whether on "The Apprentice" or pushing his NAFTA replacement, you have to admit Trump has a flair for salesmanship.

Honestly, same.

You got hammered with a hurricane. But that's over now. And I am here now. Like, that's literally what he is saying here.

"That's Puerto Rico and they don't like me." -- Donald Trump, literally 10 seconds before he said this.

This is a classic Trump pitch -- and it's at the core of his appeal: Trump and other "regular" people are in a cultural war against "elites" in government, media and everywhere else.

What's that? You're right! It is strange that a billionaire who never lived outside of New York City before he moved to the White House has successfully become the voice of the common man.

The super elite: The elite, but with bigger houses. And boats.

Remember that Trump's natural state is as a bully. it's where he's best and most comfortable.

Trump is referring to the surveillance of a former aide -- Carter Page -- as part of the FBI's counterintelligence probe into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. And this "spying" was totally lawful -- approved by a FISA court and re-approved three times. Just saying.

Wait, being president is hard? I had never thought of that!

Totally responsible rhetoric here from the President of the United States! Very normal! (Side note: I couldn't find the article Trump read that said "everybody's being stabbed.")

A real, unedited sentence from the President of the United States.

... said the President of the United States about the speaker of the US House while in a foreign country -- and with thousands of grave markers in the background of his TV shot.

"If I made any statement about anybody it would be like a big headline, why would he do that when he's overseas?" -- Donald Trump, literally two minutes before saying this.

In which Trump suggests that the Queen of England has never had a better time -- ever -- than she did hanging out with him over the past few days.

In sum: Tariffs are beautiful. But only when you are a piggy bank. And have "all the money."

Trump 2020 slogan: Won't get fooled again!

French wine is great.

Wait, people walk around in $2 billion undershirts? Or they don't? Either way -- our geniuses are better than China's geniuses, I guess?

Be best.

In any normal presidency, this would be a news story for a week. The President of the United States accusing the opposition party of committing "many crimes"!??! Without evidence, to boot! But because Trump says things like this -- again, with zero evidence -- all the time, it barely causes a ripple.

Me in 8th grade: "I DO SO have a girlfriend. She's a model and she totally loves me. You can't meet her. She lives in Montana. She writes me every day. But the letters are private."

Melania T. has a nice ring to it! Trump was talking, by the way, about his decision to redo Air Force One because he didn't like the "baby blue" color picked by First Lady Jackie Kennedy.

OK. So, Point 1: Trump doesn't believe in pollsters. Point 2: He just met with a pollster and he is "winning everywhere." THIS ALL MAKES SENSE TO ME!!!!

Truly stunning stuff here. What Trump, who is, reminder, the President of the United States, seems to fail to grasp is that a foreign county would almost certainly have a motive for passing along negative information about Trump's opponent.

This explanation is the best one I've seen about why Trump uses Twitter so much. He loves to be able to drive news cycles -- even if the news cycle is unfavorable to him. The power to do it is intoxicating to him -- someone who spent his whole life trying to get coverage for himself from what he believed to be a biased media. Now, he can make the news with a single tweet. And he loves it.

Nobody? Ever? [Consults first page of any history book ever.]

This is accurate -- especially if your definition of "treated supposedly very badly" is "was assassinated."

This seems to suggest that Trump doesn't believe Kim is a bad guy -- and that many of the reports of the atrocities by Kim are, uh, "fake news?"

My college jazz fusion band was named "Instantaneously Wealthy Behemoth."

First, Trump is saying his record of appointing federal judges is behind only that of America's first president. Second: "Your favorite president, Donald Trump."

If you are looking for an encapsulation of why Trump won in 2016 -- and why he could win again in 2020 -- this is it. This is Trump at his anti-elite, populist best -- railing against a system that he argues hates and disdains the average person.

Pretty low-stakes then, right?

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is no dummy. He knows that the way to Trump's heart is through flattery and obsequiousness. Hence, a "beautiful" birthday card.

Zero subtlety from Trump here when it comes to suggesting that Biden has something wrong with him.

Japan: It's nonstop. It's big. It's beautiful. And clean! This is the stuff of travel brochures (do those even exist anymore?)

"Canada: Not happy like the US is happy" has potential as a future slogan for our neighbors to the north. Trump said this during a press conference in Osaka, Japan, on Canada Day.

Same.

Donald Trump on his election night: "One of the most extraordinary and exciting evenings in the history of television and the history of anything." The history of anything!!

Uh, OK. (Trump is talking about MS-13 here.)

The President of the United States would like you to know he has "poor" friends, ladies and gentlemen.

These were two sentences that the President said back-to-back. And, no, I have no idea what he believed the connection to be -- or if he believed there to be one.

I laughed out loud when I read this quote about former special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony on Capitol Hill. Not kidding.

Crowd size has long been Trump's stand-in for popularity. If 8,000 people in North Carolina turn out to see his rally, how can he be unpopular in all of these "fake" polls? The logic flaw here, of course, is large enough to fly a 747 through.

Yes, of course, the crowd began chanting "Lock her up!" after Trump said this. On a related note, the 2016 election ended 997 days before he said this.

Well, this is good news!

I don't really have much to add here.

Information for life!

"Big beautiful hands of yours." -- The President of the United States.

This was supposedly an official White House event. Which means taxpayers were paying for the costs of it, not Trump's 2020 campaign. Which is weird because, well, the speech was totally and completely political.

The best winning. So much product.

The President of the United States on guns.

Link:

Donald Trump's 199 wildest lines of 2019 - CNN

Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party – The New York Times

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Trump is emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unfit for office, and Im sure a lot of Republicans feel the same way, Mr. Trott said. But if they say that, the social media barrage will be overwhelming. He added that he would be open to the presidential candidacy of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump dangles rewards to those who show loyalty a favorable tweet, or a presidential visit to their state and his heavy hand has assured victory for a number of Republican candidates in their primaries. That includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who did as many Fox News appearances as possible to draw the presidents attention.

The greatest fear any member of Congress has these days is losing a primary, said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who lost his general election last year in a heavily Hispanic Miami-area district. Thats the foremost motivator.

The larger challenge with Mr. Trump is that all politics is personal with him, and he carefully tracks who on television is praising him or denouncing his latest rhetorical excess. He is the White House political director, Scott Reed, a longtime Republican consultant, said.

More conventional presidents may be more understanding of lawmakers who are pulled in a different direction by the political demands of their districts but Mr. Trump has shown little tolerance for such dissent. Mr. Curbelo, for instance, occasionally spoke out against Mr. Trump, particularly over immigration policy, and the president took notice.

Riding with Mr. Trump in his limousine on Key West last year, Mr. Curbelo recalled in an interview that the president had noted that people were lining the streets to show their support for him, and asked Mr. Curbelo if they were in his district.

He said they were, prompting the president to turn to others in the car and say: Maybe Carlos will stop saying such nasty things about me, Mr. Curbelo recalled.

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Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party - The New York Times

Trump is rolling back over 80 environmental regulations. Here are five big changes you might have missed in 2019 – CNBC

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US President Donald Trump holds up a "Trump Digs Coal" sign as he arrives to speak during a Make America Great Again Rally at Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, West Virginia, August 3, 2017.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

President Donald Trump has taken historically unprecedented action to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution.

The administration has targeted about 85 environmental rules, according to Harvard Law School's rollback tracker.

Existing environment regulations are meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect land and animals from oil and gas drilling and development, as well as limit pollution and toxic waste runoff into the country's water. The administration views many of them as onerous to fossil fuel companies and other major industries.

However, the consequences of eliminating these regulations include more premature deaths from pollutants and higher levels of climate change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to research from the NYU Law School.

Here are five major environmental rollback stories of 2019 that highlight the administration's efforts to loosen restrictions on methane emissions, power plants and automobile tailpipes, as well protections for endangered animals and clean water in the U.S.

A woman holds a sign while attending a public hearing before the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) regarding a proposed stipulated abatement order to stop a nearby massive natural gas leak, on January 16, 2016 in Granada Hills, near Porter Ranch, California. More than 80,000 metric tons of methane gas have spewed from the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility since October 23, causing thousands of Porter Ranch residents to leave their homes.

David McNew | Getty Images

The Trump administration in August announced plans to significantly weaken regulation on climate-changing methane emissions. If adopted, the government would no longer have to require oil and gas companies to implement technology to monitor and fix methane leaks from facilities and pipelines. The rule would also open debate on whether the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate methane as a pollutant.

Methane is dangerous because large amounts of it is escaping from oil and gas sites across the country and accelerating global warming. Methane levels have soared since 2007, with natural gas production as a primary suspect.

The Trump EPA argued that the proposal will save the oil and gas industry $17 million to $19 million annually in compliance costs and remove "unnecessary" burdens.

By the agency's calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons over roughly five years. Scientists and environmental advocates called the proposal an "assault" on the environment and a major setback in the fight against climate change.

A pylon stands over Cargill Inc. salt ponds in this aerial photograph taken above Newark, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019. California and environmental groups say the Trump administration misinterpreted federal law when it classified San Francisco Bay Area salt ponds as beyond the scope of the Clean Water Act.

Sam Hall | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The EPA in September repealed a major Obama-era clean water regulation that curbed the amount of pollution and chemicals in the country's rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands.

The repeal allows polluters to discharge toxic substances into waterways without a permit, which could significantly harm the country's sources of safe drinking water and habitats for wildlife. The Obama-era rule had aimed to protect 60% of the country's water bodies from contamination and keep drinking water safe for about one-third of the country.

The repeal is a win for some farmers and rural landowners who no longer need a permit to use pesticides and fertilizers that could run off into water or are restricted from some types of plowing and planting.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the rollback would allow farmers to "spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time building infrastructure." The administration also argues that the repeal would promote economic growth and minimize regulatory uncertainty.

A healthy Florida panther is seen on display at the Palm Beach Zoo. The subspecies is protected as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

The Trump administration said in August it would change the rules for the Endangered Species Act, making it harder to protect wildlife from threats of human development and global warming.

The new rules make it easier to take out protections for threatened animals and plants and allow federal agencies to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether to protect a species from things like construction projects in a critical habitat. The rules also remove tools used by scientists to predict future harm to species from climate change.

The administration said the changes would make the legislation more efficient and decrease burdens on landowners and companies.

Revealing the cost of protecting wildlife could open new threats to endangered species and habitats. Since it was signed into law 45 years ago, the Endangered Species Act has been credited with rescuing species like the bald eagle, grizzly bear, Florida manatee and humpback whale.

Attorneys general in 17 states have sued the Trump administration over the changes.

A bulldozer moves coal that will be burned to generate electricity at the American Electric Power coal-fired power plant in Winfield, West Virginia. The Trump administration in June implemented a new rule that will keep coal-powered plants open longer.

Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Trump administration in June implemented a rule that will keep coal-powered plants open longer, replacing an Obama-era climate effort to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions and continuing the administration's efforts to ease regulatory burdens for the coal industry.

The so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule gives states more power to decide how to control emissions and less authority to the federal government in setting emissions standards. One of the administration's goals is to allow coal power plants a chance to remain in business despite the rise in other forms of energy generation such as natural gas and solar.

In response, 29 cities and states sued the EPA's replacement of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, arguing it extends U.S. dependence on coal power and blocks states from pursuing clean energy production.

The case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court, setting up major implications for efforts to mitigate climate change. If the court favors the Trump administration, the rule would weaken the ability of future administrations to regulate pollution from power plants and global warming.

Motor vehicles drive on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, California on September 17, 2019. California and 22 other states have sued to challenge the Trump administration's decision revoke California's authority to set its own emissions rules.

Robyn Beck | Getty Images

The White House this year also prepared to eliminate an Obama-era regulation in place to reduce automobile emissions that contribute to global warming. The administration argues that the rollback is necessary for economic and safety reasons, though environmentalists say consumers would spend billions more in fuel costs and accelerate climate change.

Four of the world's largest automakers responded in July by striking a deal with California to reduce vehicle emissions. California and 13 other states promised to continue enforcing the stricter rule, a move that could split the country's auto market and set up a financial headache for automakers.

Later in September, the administration barred California from setting its own emissions standards, which officials said would give people access to cheaper and safer vehicles. The state has set tougher emissions standards that essentially directed the industry to begin unveiling zero-emissions vehicles and battery-electric and hydrogen-powered cars.

California and 22 other states sued to challenge the administration's decision, setting up a legal fight that could reach the Supreme Court.

WATCH: The economics behind planting millions and millions of trees

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Trump is rolling back over 80 environmental regulations. Here are five big changes you might have missed in 2019 - CNBC

Donald Trump Is Still Feuding With the Wind – Vanity Fair

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Donald Trumps hatred of windmills is the stuff of world-historical record. Long before he launched his presidential bid, Trump lost a legal battle with Scotland over the installation of a wind farm near his golf course there, arguing that the turbines would completely destroy the bucolic Aberdeen Bay and cast a terrible shadow upon the future of tourism for the area. Since becoming president, his claims have grown more derangedin April he argued, with zero basis in fact, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. And over the weekend, his quixotic vendetta agains the wind reached new levels of crazy.

Speaking to supporters at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Florida on Sunday, the president went on a another deranged tangent about his least-favorite renewable energy source, claiming that wind turbines look like hell, fill the atmosphere with tremendous fumes, and should be put in jail for killing eagles.

Acknowledging that he has never understood wind, despite claiming in his next breath to know windmills very much thanks to his having studied it better than anybody I know, Trump opened his tirade like so:

Theyre manufactured tremendousif youre into thistremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprintfumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether its in China, Germany, its going into the air. Its our air, their air, everythingright?

After alerting his audience to the fact that we have a world, Trump next expressed grievances about the havoc windmills wreak on the landscape:

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Donald Trump Is Still Feuding With the Wind - Vanity Fair

In Texas, Republican women are on the front lines for Donald Trump – The Texas Tribune

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HOUSTON An audible groan erupted in the lounge area of Houstons Gulf Coast Distillers in late October when high-profile Trump campaign operative Mica Mosbacher invoked the idea of a Democratic presidency.

Mosbacher encouraged the audience of roughly 50 GOP women a group that included a millionaire Texas congressional candidate, the owner of a gun store and a Gov. Greg Abbott political appointee to turn their grumbling into action.

Its not the boys club anymore, she said.

Texas Republicans need women on their side if theyre going to keep the state red in 2020, but recent polls suggest President Donald Trumps support among women is plummeting. A secret recording of outgoing House Speaker Dennis Bonnen laid bare the GOPs anxieties about the president: Hes killing us in urban-suburban districts, Bonnen told a Republican activist in late June.

Trumps campaign seems to take the risk seriously. At the October Women for Trump panel discussion, a group of female surrogates mostly white, some living in D.C. parachuted into a historically black neighborhood in the heart of Texas biggest city to sip drinks and implore Republican women: We need your help.

Mosbacher, whose resume includes stints working for GOP fixtures like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and the late John McCain, turned to one of the women next to her to bring the point home.

What would you tell people who are on the fence about President Trump? Mosbacher, a member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board, asked Women for Trump member Karen Henry.

It would be hard for me to be nice to em, Henry, a mother of four and Houston-area business owner, quipped. But if you want somebody whos going to stand up to the media, who does what he says hes going to do hes the only person you can vote for.

Onstage next to Henry was fellow member Melanie Luttrell. Dont you want your kids to grow up in the America you grew up in? she asked the crowd. Many women nodded their heads solemnly in agreement.

The visit to Houston was one of many that Trump campaign surrogates have made in recent months as part of a broader national outreach to suburban women, a voting bloc that will be essential to Trumps reelection campaign. But a majority of Texas women said in October they would definitely vote for someone besides Trump in the 2020 presidential election, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. And 46% of people living in the suburbs said the same thing, according to the poll, compared to 41% who said they would definitely vote for him.

First: Panelists address attendees during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers in Houston on Oct. 29, 2019. Last: Women for Trump Advisory Board Member Mica Mosbacher asks a question to panelists during a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative Training hosted by Women for Trump at Gulf Coast Distillers.Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune

The goal of the Houston gathering was two-fold: energize existing supporters and encourage them to spread the gospel of Trump campaigns promises lower taxes, free-market health care, less government regulation, telling off the fake news media, and cleaning up the swamp that is Washington D.C. bureaucracy to their friends and neighbors.

We need every one of you to replicate yourselves, said Penny Nance, the CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, who also said she is an evangelical Christian.

Texas has the largest group of new voters, she continued. So guess what? We need to get them signed up.

But beyond the four walls of the Houston distillery, that might be easier said than done. Even Texas historically conservative suburbs now appear competitive: A Houston-area congressional seat flipped to Democrats in 2018, and both Harris and Fort Bend Counties are overwhelmingly blue. In the Dallas region, Republicans lost a second congressional seat last year, along with a slate of state House seats and a state Senate one.

For 2020, Democrats are targeting six congressional seats and have their sights set on nearly two dozen seats they hope to flip in the Texas House most of which are in the suburbs. If the minority party can win nine state House seats next year, theyll gain control of a chamber in the Texas Legislature for the first time in nearly two decades.

If Trump is going to help win back the seats Texas Republicans lost last year, the effort may hinge on suburban women, their neighbors and friends. But its in those suburban enclaves where some experts believe the gender gap is the widest.

The numbers are pretty clear that the level of support among suburban women for the Republicans and for President Trump has dropped, said Texas GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser.

Theres the gender gap and were aware of it and we all see it, he said, noting a summer NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found a huge drop in support for Trump among women. Its based on the personality and the behavior of the most prominent figure in the Republican Party.

At the Women for Trump event, the presidents surrogates nonetheless shrugged off the notion that their candidate is lacking for support in the suburbs. When Mosbacher asked how women have succeeded under Trumps economy, Henry told a story about her Salvadoran housekeeper. The woman, who has a green card, Henry said, had complained during the Obama presidency that Henry was not paying as much.

Henrys answer: Blame the Democrat and his raising the taxes.

But Trumps 2018 tax breaks gave Henry noticeably more disposable income and as a result, her housekeeper saw a little raise in her paycheck, Henry said. (Research shows the tax cuts have primarily benefited the wealthy.)

First: Women for Tump members cheer from their seats during the organization's holiday celebration featuring a keynote speech from President Donald Trump's 2020 Senior Campaign Adviser Katrina Pierson at the Holiday Inn Tyler Conference Center in Tyler. Last: President Donald Trump's 2020 Senior Campaign Adviser Katrina Pierson greets the crowd during a Women for Trump Holiday Celebration at the Holiday Inn Tyler Conference Center in Tyler.Cara Campbell/The Texas Tribune

Other panelists said Trumps appointment of judges who oppose abortion rights to the Supreme Court was enough to sway their friends and acquaintances. They also touted his focus on fighting sex trafficking and a proposed $1 billion one-time investment to increase the supply of child care in underserved populations all things Mosbacher said appealed to women.

Im a policy wonk, and I really, truly believe his policies are working, said Jacquie Baly, an Abbott appointee to his University Research Initiative advisory board.

Baly, Nance and Mosbacher are just some of the many high-profile Republicans the Trump campaign has deployed to Texas ahead of next years election cycle. For a Women for Trump Holiday Celebration in Tyler this month, Trumps senior campaign adviser Katrina Pierson, who hails from the Dallas suburbs, was the special guest. And when Trumps eldest son Donald Trump Jr. headlined a San Antonio rally earlier this year, his girlfriend and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle was at his side.

Its a strategic change from Trumps 2016 election, which relied primarily on Facebook and a select number of high-profile male campaign surrogates. Since then, the White House has increased the number of women in public-facing roles, and has relied upon a litany of GOP women onto his campaign to speak on his behalf, including Guilfoyle, Lara Trump, social media stars Diamond and Silk and Kellyanne Conway.

Texas Democrats say its evidence of Republican fears about the state turning blue. Democrats hope to weaponize Trumps record particularly the fallout from his administrations policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border against him.

Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase, alternative facts and I think that the president and his team basically relies on alternative facts, said Mustafa Tameez, a Houston-based Democratic strategist. While hes vulnerable and has lost support among women, his supporters will disregard any evidence proving that.

But the Trump campaign hopes to galvanize a different profile of a suburban woman, one who might have gone unnoticed by pundits and strategists: the silent voter who will turn out for the president in 2020.

Democratic and Republican strategists painted a profile of such a voter: She is a fan of Trumps brash personality and likes that he behaves more like a businessman than a politician. She probably comes from a higher-income household and is college educated. She also might have a family and has seen her or her husbands business thrive economically over the last few years.

This woman might not show up to events like the one organized in Houston, and she might live in an area where the presidents message is a tougher sell. But if the campaign can make sure she votes on Nov. 3, 2020, the hope is, they can help prove pollsters wrong.

Theres a silent majority of people who dont speak what they really believe and theyll go to the polls and theyll vote for Trump because of who hes running against, Henry said in an interview.

Democrats concede that its this brand of silent supporter that helped springboard Trump to the White House in 2016, something theyre trying to account for ahead of next year.

But what remains to be seen for GOP strategists is whether they can court new voters, a demographic coveted by both parties. Republicans are already trying to correct for this. Earlier this year, a super PAC named Engage Texas launched to register hundreds of thousands of new Texas voters here and convince them to help them keep the state red.

At the Houston event, after Mosbacher concluded the panel discussion and some of the room had emptied, Kayla Hensley, the regional director for the Republican Party of Texas, kicked off a PowerPoint presentation about how women could get out the vote.

Hensleys message spoke directly to women like Rhonda Velders, who has lived in Nassau Bay for the last 30 years. Velders is the type of woman the campaign is hoping will thrill to its message: Shes a lifelong Republican, a mental health therapist who said shes seen economic success under Trumps presidency.

Velders was shaken when she saw her hometown vote blue in 2018 but believes things will turn around next year. As women, were going to rise up, and be able to say, I dont have to be ashamed of being a woman. And frankly, I dont have to be ashamed that Im white because I feel like sometimes youre shamed for being white.

Trump loyalists hope the results of the 2018 midterms, in which Cruz eked out a win over Democrat Beto ORourke, were an anomaly and enough to motivate conservative women to turn out for the GOP next year.

Its not rocket science, Velders said. But if were not careful, were going to lose everything we know.

Pollsters say theres no magic number for how many women like Velders Republicans need to pursue in order to maintain their stronghold over the state. At the very least, they say, Trump needs to perform with women as well as he did in 2016.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, Nance, the CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, said. Its now or never, ladies.

Disclosure: The University of Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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In Texas, Republican women are on the front lines for Donald Trump - The Texas Tribune

Donald Trump Has Drained the Swamp (of Good Christmas Parties) – The New York Times

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WASHINGTON It would have been a swell party. There was an oyster tower made from solid ice and charcuterie tables piled high in every room. The Charles Orban Champagne was flowing at this annual soiree, hosted by the French ambassador at the official residence, which is one of the prettier piles of brick in this town.

What there wasnt: anyone recognizable from the White House. Not even Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, who used to attend.

Who cares? The packs of journalists and foreign service officials who prowled the rooms of an imperial manse in search of someone who mattered, thats who. As any of them will tell you, this holiday season, spotting someone by the punch bowl with the ability to whisper into the presidents ear has been harder than ever.

Going out in Washington is work. Parties are places for D.C. officials and members of the press corps to meet, mix and move the pieces on the chess board. (Booze helps.) Money or beauty is irrelevant. Power, and the proximity to it, is the only metric. It has always been so.

President Trump has, as promised and to his supporters glee, disrupted Washingtons way of life. And sure, as during Watergate, the news business is booming and random bureaucrats have been thrust onto the national stage. But its been hell on the social life.

Two nights after the French ambassadors holiday party, which was held Dec. 10, the situation wasnt quite as dire at the British embassy. Mick Mulvaney, perhaps celebrating the one-year anniversary of being named Mr. Trumps acting chief of staff, dropped in for a moment while partygoers watched the votes pile up for Boris Johnson, Mr. Trumps blond buddy across the pond.

Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the National Republican Committee, also attended. Still, this shindig wasnt what it once was.

Big-name White House officials used to come out en masse. When the last British ambassador described the Trump White House in cables to 10 Downing Street as a uniquely dysfunctional environment, his unvarnished assessments came from two years of cultivating and kibitzing with many of those aides who are now too skittish to attend.

The ambassador was run out of town after his cables leaked in July; Britain has yet to send a replacement.

There were only ever a handful of cabinet secretaries and Trump aides who would brave the night life of a city that reviles, and is reviled by, President Trump. (You know its bad when Wilbur Ross, the 82-year-old secretary of commerce who both falls asleep and wears $600 velvet slippers in public, is considered the social butterfly of this administration.) And the slow march to impeachment has made aides even less willing to mingle.

In the beginning, though, people such as Ms. Conway, Steven Mnuchin and Ivanka Trump could be counted on to show up at parties and interpret the latest presidential paroxysm in an effort to soothe the freaked-out establishment. Three years in, relations have soured.

Its like a siege mentality, said Kevin Chaffee, a senior editor at Washington Life, a society magazine that is read by President Trump. They dont want to go out and court confrontation. Trump has cast a pall.

Part of that pall may also come from the hyperpolarization that has gripped D.C., along with much of the nation. People with warring political affiliations may simply be less interested in socializing together, at least at semipublic events.

People dont even realize what it was like when President Reagan was here, Mr. Chaffee said. Every night he went out to peoples homes, the embassies, there were dinners. Even under Bush 1, the whole cabinet went out.

Sally Quinn, the Georgetown hostess, said: This has been a long time coming, in the sense that things started to slow down a while ago. But when Trump got in, there was immediate division starting from Day 1, when Sean Spicer got up and said it was the biggest crowd, period.

Division indeed. When Ms. Quinn gave a party earlier in December for the CBS anchor Norah ODonnell by most counts, one of the better parties of the season Ms. Quinn spared but one invitation for the Conway household.

It did not go to Kellyanne, but to her husband, George, a man whose popularity with the media is predicated on the last tweet he has hurled at his wife or her boss.

Still, he made something of a sorry plaything. His arm was in a wrap, and it was hard not to wince as he endured the same joke about his injured limb and bruised marriage from several different people, which went something like: Did Kellyanne do this to you because you wouldnt put the phone down? (At least Bob Woodward was interested enough in this spectacle to scribble down Mr. Conways email address.)

The turnover in this White House is so high that the diplomatic corps cant even figure out who to suck up to. After November 2016 all the ambassadors were desperately scrambling, trying to find the Trump people, and the worst part was that after three or four months, they were changing overnight, said Grard Araud, the previous French ambassador.

The ones who have found themselves suddenly in the sun, thanks in part to Mr. Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are the emissaries of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But an autocratic embassy does not a swinging party make.

I can count on one hand the embassies that are really that active, Mr. Chaffee said. It used to be more like two and a half hands.

Then there are the other bashes. At the festivities around this years Kennedy Center Honors, held the first weekend in December, the secretary of state got dressed down by Linda Ronstadt while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got a standing ovation you can see why the president skipped.

This White House has enriched the press, but it also stopped throwing a Christmastime party for reporters. The White House correspondents dinner, which reporters from The New York Times do not attend, once boasted truly glamorous after-parties. Those have dried up in the Trump era.

Its not as if President Trump is completely lacking in Christmas spirit, though. He gave most federal workers an extra day off this year, and circulated holiday cards around the Senate, delivered alongside copies of his six-page letter to Ms. Pelosi about this impeachment charade.

Anyone who has been to a family Thanksgiving knows that impeachment doesnt make for fun party talk. Jonathan Turley, the legal expert called by the Republicans to appear this month before the House Judiciary Committee, summed up the mood in Washington: The president is mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My Republican friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad. And Luna is a goldendoodle and they dont get mad.

Mr. Chaffee said: Im old enough to have been around during the last impeachment, and it was just the same as it is now meanspirited and evil, on both sides. But President Clinton never 86-ed the White House Christmas party during his impeachment.

Many presidents have understood the power of a good party, especially during a tense political time. When Franklin Delano Roosevelts critics accused him of ruling like a dictator during the Depression, he threw a toga party at the White House and dressed as Caesar.

Andrew Jacksons inaugural party in 1829 open to anyone reportedly got so rowdy that he had to flee it. (He had been elected in a ruthless campaign year and, as the populist candidate, had good reason to want to spite Washingtons elite with some rabble-rousing.)

And though President Barack Obama was thought of as more aloof than his predecessors, he drew many a Hollywood star to the Potomac. Now celebrities make headlines not for partying at the White House, but for protesting it.

When Michelle Obama was first lady, one evening at a restaurant along 14th street could ensure that it would become date-night destination dining. In contrast, Melania Trump is such a Sphinx-like creature that, for a while, many wondered if she even lived in the White House.

Though it wouldnt play into his drain the swamp narrative, Mr. Trump could have been the party animal of Pennsylvania Avenue had he wanted. Sure, hes a teetotaler, but so was Jay Gatsby. And its not like Mr. Trump goes to bed at 9, as George W. Bush did, or unwinds by reading briefing papers and eating almonds, as Mr. Obama did.

In fact, this president is a night owl who spent much of his adult life partying his way on to Page Six, surrounded by movie stars, pornographic actresses and models. He knows that social capital can be wielded as a source of soft power.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote in his memoir that during his time at the White House, Mr. Trump once called him with a proposal to build a ballroom.

Mr. Trump had taken note of what he called these state dinners on the lawn there in little tents that were not up to Mr. Trumps standards. Let me build you a ballroom you can assemble and take apart, he said to Mr. Axelrod. Trust me. Itll look great.

In 2016, Mr. Trumps tabloid chronicler in chief, Cindy Adams, wrote in her column: Watch for a quickly built Trump White House ballroom.

Quickly turned out to be a hasty estimation. But, then, infrastructure has been delayed all over.

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Donald Trump Has Drained the Swamp (of Good Christmas Parties) - The New York Times

Trump vs. Nixon: The difference between 2019’s impeachment and Watergate is shame – NBC News

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Poor Richard. When we think of President Richard M. Nixon during Watergate, many people picture an irrational and pitiable figure drinking too much, wandering the halls of the White House, talking to the paintings on the walls, trapped in a crisis created by his crazed resentments.

That isnt the whole of it, though. This was a man who, by the time of Watergate, had been in national public life for more than 30 years. He had served as a congressman, a senator and then vice president for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon was a skilled lawyer who had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and survived political crises both public and personal. He knew the powers and limitations of each piece of the U.S. government including his own.

Nixon was a skilled lawyer who knew the powers and limitations of each piece of the U.S. government including his own.

Toward Watergates end, Nixon took stock of his situation in light of his deep experience and educated judgment and, in a farsighted move, resigned the presidency before the U.S. House of Representatives could impeach him. Nixon, in other words, knew when the jig was up.

Today, its Donald Trump whos enmeshed in a presidential scandal. Its hard to imagine a man whose political experience and temperament are less like Nixons. Nixon had a lifetime in politics; Trump never held a political office before the presidency. Nixon, at least in public, spoke and wrote in the measured tones of an accomplished government official; Trump well, we know how Trump expresses himself. Nixon was a subtle strategic thinker; Trumps signature skill, as his wife Melania has said, is to "punch back 10 times harder."

In one key way, however, the difference in character gives Trump a far better chance of surviving as president: Trump will do almost anything to avoid acknowledging that hes been defeated. He never accepts it even when it happens.

Yet, Trump has weaknesses of his own and hes begun to reveal them. They give us a clue about what kind of setbacks may actually persuade him to accept that the jig is up.

For two years, from the June, 1972 Watergate break-in all the way to the summer of 1974, it looked as if Nixon just might make it through his scandal. True, the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre was bad. But even then, the end wasnt certain.

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The previous May, Nixons attorney general, Elliot Richardson, had appointed former Solicitor General Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. In October, when Cox tried to subpoena tapes that Nixon had made of Oval Office conversations, the president determined to fire him. But it took Nixon three tries and two resignations first of Richardson, then of Richardsons deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus to find an official who would fire Cox. The public reaction to the firing was explosive.

Even with all that, Nixon still had a fighting chance. The only testimony that tied Nixon directly to the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up came from former White House Counsel John Dean, whom some considered a less-than-savory character. If it came to a credibility contest between the two men, Nixon believed he would win.

After all, there was no smoking gun: no written record or piece of testimony in which Nixon himself could be seen or heard directing the cover-up.

There was no smoking gun until there was. The tape confirming that Nixon had tried to use the Central Intelligence Agency to shut down any further F.B.I. investigation of the Watergate break-in finally surfaced after repeated attacks on the White House rock face by the chisels of investigators and litigators.

Once that tape became public, three senior Republican officials Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John Rhodes visited Nixon in the White House and updated him about his dwindling support on the Hill.

Some versions of the story say the Republican lawmakers told Nixon to resign. In other accounts, however, the congressmen did not make any such recommendation. They didnt have to. Nixon, a canny political analyst and vote-counter nonpareil, foresaw that all his reasonably possible future moves were doomed to end in checkmate. He knew the jig was up.

You might think that Trump, when viewing the evidence thats been gathered so far, would also conclude that the jig is up this time. The public testimony by multiple witnesses has been damaging. In addition, this evidence is now growing tentacles. The House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed phone logs, featuring players like Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the committees ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that virtually beg journalists to mine them for additional leads. Indictments by the Southern District of New York have already dredged up at least one cooperating witness, and the investigation continues.

Moreover, once the articles of impeachment hit the Senate, even one controlled by Republicans, witnesses who declined to testify to the House may find themselves spilling the beans to Chief Justice John Roberts, who would preside over the trial. It will be a new ball game with fresh and uncontrollable hazards.

Trump has the protection of a highly polarized public and the steadfast congressional Republicans who reflect it. The archetype of House Republican behavior during the Intelligence Committee hearings on impeachment, for example, was Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio: What you heard, he said to Ambassador William Taylor, who testified about the hold-up of Ukraine aid, did not happen. Its not just could it have been wrong, the fact is it was wrong, because it did not happen.

But the Republicans arent Trumps chief asset. His biggest defense, for better or worse, is that he doesnt have the temperamental or intellectual capacity to conclude that the jig is up. As a result, the jig may not be up for him at all.

Trump is known for not just saying things that arent true, but for betraying no visible embarrassment when hes brought face-to-face with the discrepancies. So when Trump fights accusers who want to bring him down, his strength composed in equal parts of his sense of grievance and his belief in his own persuasive powers is unburdened by shame or embarrassment at his past words and actions.

Trump isnt a strategist or vote-counter; hes a counterpuncher. For as long as you keep hitting him, hell just keep hitting back. You cant persuade him that the jig is up at least not by hitting him directly.

Trump is known for not just saying things that arent true but betraying no visible embarrassment when hes brought face-to-face with the discrepancies.

But Trump does have another kind of weakness. At the recent North American Treaty Organizations 70th anniversary birthday meeting in London, an open microphone picked up allied leaders French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Britains Princess Anne allegedly mocking Trump. The video showed the groups members smiling and animated. They were in high spirits.

The next day, Trumps reaction was far from coherent. He called Trudeau two-faced. He explained Trudeaus comment as a reaction to Trumps demand that Canada pay its required 2 percent of gross domestic product to the alliance. But he also called Trudeau a nice guy and later described the two-faced comment as funny. He then canceled his participation in the closing press briefing and left the NATO meeting early.

Trumps flailing recalls his 2018 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which he asserted that his administration had accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country. The assembled diplomats laughed at him. Trumps response from the podium was, So true. Then, he said to the delegates, Didnt expect that reaction, but thats OK. Afterward, he claimed that the delegates hadnt been laughing at him but with him. Delegates confirmed that, no, they had definitely been laughing at him.

In short, Trump is not ready for this kind of attack. Hell keep on counter-punching for as long as he gets punched, but he doesnt show the same kind of spirit when hes subjected to mockery at least mockery by people he considers his peers.

That may be a clue as to what it will take to persuade Trump, as opposed to Nixon, that the jig is indeed up. It may be a roadmap for his opponents as well: less expression of nonstop outrage, more demonstration of why hes become a laughingstock.

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Trump vs. Nixon: The difference between 2019's impeachment and Watergate is shame - NBC News

Late Night in 2019: Trump, Trump and More Trump – The New York Times

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I dont want to talk about Donald Trump every night. None of us do. But he gives us no choice.

That was Jimmy Kimmel. In March. Its safe to say he talked about President Trump nearly every night since.

Kimmels lament was emblematic of the fact that, in late-night comedy, 2019 was yet another year dominated by Trumps tweets, gaffes, comments, decisions, hirings, firings and foibles. The Trump Administration so totally dominated late-night monologues and bits, its more useful to break up the year into mini-eras of Trump: The Mueller Report era, the whistle-blower era, the ongoing impeachment era.

And even when Trump wasnt Topic A, politics still was, as more than 20 Democratic hopefuls entered the race to run against him in 2020.

Kimmels March complaint was actually prompted by a tweet from Trump agreeing with a former host, Jay Leno, who said in an interview that he found current late-night shows to be one-sided.

If Trump sat in the White House all day quietly working on things, I would almost never mention him, because its not interesting, Kimmel countered in his monologue. But today not even today, before 10 a.m. today, before 10 oclock this morning, his former campaign chairman was sentenced to prison for the second time in a week, he called himself the most successful president in history and he tweeted to let people know his wife hasnt been replaced with a body double.

Im not supposed to mention that?

The long-awaited Mueller Report was finally released to the public in April, in the form of a heavily redacted 448-page document.

Political analysts are going to try to read through these redactions like teenage boys trying to watch scrambled porn on cable in 1985. JIMMY KIMMEL

Muellers report was followed by his highly anticipated testimony in July, which Stephen Colbert called the Super Bowl of things on C-Span at 8:30 in the morning. But Muellers performance, full of references to inconclusive findings and subjects that were outside my purview, did not satisfy Trumps opponents.

What were you expecting? Did you think Mueller was going to smash through the wall in a monster truck called the DeTrumpulator? SETH MEYERS

Mueller was so widely described as boring on the stand, on The Late Show, Colbert joked that he only got 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. But Colbert also said he wasnt interested in a government who cared about ratings, because we already have that with Donald Trump.

And while the president claimed he wouldnt be watching any part of the hearings, Kimmel pointed out that Trump spent his entire day tweeting about them.

He tweeted more than 20 times today, capping the tweetstorm off with this: Truth is a force of nature! And we all know how much respect he has for nature, so. JIMMY KIMMEL

While interest in the Mueller Report quickly faded, it was soon followed by a whistle-blower complaint with allegations that Trump required a quid pro quo from the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.

In April, late night made one of its earliest mentions of Zelensky, now somewhat of a household name. Conan OBrien pointed out that the incoming president was a fellow stand-up comedian whod spent some time on television.

I looked up their Constitution: The order of succession in Ukraine goes comedian, juggler, magician, then secretary of defense. Thats how it works. After hearing about it, Elizabeth Warren signed up for improv classes. CONAN OBRIEN

Who would believe Volodymyr Zelensky would be his Monica Lewinsky? Kimmel later joked of Trump in September, as details of the presidents July call emerged. In his statement, the whistle-blower said several U.S. officials confirmed Trump was hoping Zelensky would play ball, and Colbert couldnt pass up a chance to poke fun.

[Imitating Trump] O.K., Ukraine. You gotta play ball, O.K.? And I mean let me get to second base, O.K.? Over the bra, under the Constitution. STEPHEN COLBERT

With the current impeachment hearings continuing, Trump is sure to be a focus throughout the holiday season, as late-night hosts wait for an opportunity to talk about something and someone else.

In October, Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaigns communications director, demanded Kimmel issue a retraction for suggesting the president was golfing during the Delta Force raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On air, Kimmel admitted hed been wrong.

Trump was at one of his golf courses for the 238th time since taking office, Kimmel said. But he finished the round, and was back at the White House by 5 oclock. Whether or not they were waiting for him to finish the round I imagine Delta Force sitting there in the choppers, locked and loaded going, What hole is he on now?

Kimmel then called for Trump to retract the weird detailed lie the president shared at a 2018 rally in South Carolina. (Trump claimed Kimmel fawned over him when he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live.)

And while youre working on factual accuracy, your boss has now lied in public approximately 14,000 times since he took office, Kimmel continued, in response to Murtaugh. He should probably start the retracting and correcting soon because hes 73.

The only 2019 rivals to Trumps screen time were the numerous democratic hopefuls for 2020. Some clear front-runners have emerged, with Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg consistently polling highest, though not necessarily in that order. These politicians prove a little more difficult to imitate than Trump, but it doesnt mean Jimmy Fallon hasnt tried on The Tonight Show.

Nowadays, most of you recognize me from the rallying cries of hope and unity that Ive stirred across the nation. But the rest of you know me from my hit series, The Boy Who Became Mayor, only on Disney Channel. JIMMY FALLON, impersonating Buttigieg

As the candidates made their rounds on late night, no interviews were more entertaining than Desus and Meros. The Showtime co-hosts played basketball with Cory Booker, grilled Senator Sanders on his favorite rappers and challenged Senator Warren, who has a plan for everything, to help them complete an escape room.

Biden offered plenty of fodder for mockery, with his inappropriate touching, frequent gaffes and new campaign slogan: No malarkey. The former vice president was also ridiculed for his frequent name-dropping of President Obama.

[Biden] spent eight years as Americas vice president and surprise masseuse, but before that, he had a whole career that you might not know about. You know, kind of like how some people only know Billy Ray Cyrus from Lil Nas Xs Old Town Road remix. And like Billy Ray, Biden was doing his own thing for decades before he was made cool by a young black man. TREVOR NOAH

Late-night shows werent entirely focused on presidential politics. For example, in June, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a pivotal moment in the gay rights movement, inspired plenty of tribute, remote bits and satire. Much of it mocked the commercialization of Pride Month, the time of the year where we all celebrate the L.G.B.T.Q. community and corporate America celebrates them by selling us, Rainbow Goodyear tires, Colbert joked. Yasss, traction!

Both The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee sent correspondents on the road. In honor of the Stonewall anniversary, Jaboukie Young-White took The Daily Show to Pittsburghs Pride Parade, looking to find out if companies like Walmart are gay and if queer capitalism is totally chill.

In New York, the transgender comic Patti Harrison went to the Stonewall Inn for Full Frontal, exploring the history of gay liberation and Pride celebrations, which she joked was started by United Airlines, Citigroup, Postmates, Tesla, YouTube, Android and the Trump campaign.

In 2018, Harrison and the comic Julio Torres satirically pitched the idea of Straight Pride on The Tonight Show, and this year, someone actually followed through. A Boston-based group called Super Happy Fun America launched its own Straight Pride Parade this summer. Its so troll-y! Trevor Noah said. Especially a straight parade in Boston. The city has had six Super Bowl parades. What do you think that is?

If youre wondering the difference between the Gay Pride Parade and the Straight Pride Parade, the Gay Pride Parade will have women at it. STEPHEN COLBERT

The mockery got intramural in September, when The Late Late Show host James Corden, best known for his star-studded Carpool Karaoke and Crosswalk the Musical segments, criticized Bill Maher for his comments about fat shaming on Real Time with Bill Maher. (Maher insinuated that overweight people should be shamed into losing weight.)

So I sat at home, and Im watching this and all I could think as I was watching was, Oh man, somebody needs to say something about this, Corden said. If only there was someone with a platform who knew what it was actually like to be overweight and then I realized, Aah, that will be me.

Corden, who follows Colbert on CBS, acknowledged that he and Maher, who shares HBO with John Oliver, have a lot in common We both host the second most popular talk shows on our network and that Maher has always been kind to him in person. But as for Mahers comments about how overweight men cannot see their own nether regions, Corden responded: Believe me, I can see a [expletive].

Bill, please hear me when I say this, Corden said in conclusion. While youre encouraging people to think about what goes into their mouths, just think a little harder about what comes out of yours.

Some of the most memorable sketches of 2019 had nothing to do with Trump, particularly a few built around celebrity stunts. Exhibit A: the enviable Day Drinking with Rihanna on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Brad Pitt and Fallon just couldnt stop showing each other their gratitude in Courtesy of the Gentleman at the Bar.

Finally, a fictional political era one that seemed comparatively less outlandish by the week came to an end this year when HBOs Veep wrapped up its seven-season run in May. Colbert offered a fitting send-off, hosting a very special crossover episode on The Late Show.

The bit featured some of beloved stars of Veep, including, of course President Selina Meyer, who laughed off Colberts suggestion that their actions had real-world consequences.

Foul-mouthed president who tweets like a child. Blaming everything on the Chinese. Election interference. A completely moronic press secretary, Colbert says. Anti-daylight savings time laws, 700 measles cases and rising. You are killing my world!

Meyers rather Trump-like response hit below the belt: Another 85 pounds of generic white male mediocrity that shops at the lesbian warehouse.

Seriously, she added, you look like Letterman took the least funny dump of his life into a child suit.

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Late Night in 2019: Trump, Trump and More Trump - The New York Times

After Impeachment, an Angry Trump Looks to Voters for Vindication – The New York Times

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People are outraged because they know what is really going on is that Pelosi and the Democrats think that they know best, Mr. Fredericks said. Their message to us is, You are really stupid people who go to Walmart and smell and cant be trusted. Its an insult.

Still, Democrats are energized, too, and may be more so if a Senate trial results in acquittal along party lines. Moreover, Mr. Trumps backlash strategy did not work as well as he had hoped during last years midterm elections when he tried to convert conservatives anger over what they considered unfair sexual misconduct allegations against Brett M. Kavanaugh, the presidents Supreme Court nominee, into turnout at the polls.

Arguably, the passion generated by the Kavanaugh hearings helped Republicans in select Senate races, but Democrats went on to capture the House.

John Whitbeck, the Republican Party chairman in Virginia, where Democrats captured the state legislature last month, said that impeachment helped Republicans see the stakes of the 2020 election more clearly. But the longer term political trends, he warned, suggested the party could still fall short.

If you are a Trump supporter and you didnt vote in these off-year elections, I just dont see how you dont show up, he said. But I dont know if thats going to be enough to overcome the fervor on the other side.

In states like Virginia that have trended away from Republicans, Mr. Whitbeck said antipathy toward Mr. Trump has been so overwhelming that his political operation has been unable to account for it accurately in its data.

We spent a ton of money trying to get Trump voters engaged. Were doing everything we can to account for the high turnout. And still weve underestimated it every year, he said. Its just historic on the other side.

Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and Jeremy W. Peters reported from Washington, and Elaina Plott from New York. Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from New York, and Elizabeth Dias from Washington.

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After Impeachment, an Angry Trump Looks to Voters for Vindication - The New York Times

Satire In The US Has A Trump Problem – TPM

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This article is the result of a collaboration between TPM members and journalism graduate students at NYU. Over the past several months, NYU students from 10 different countries solicited the help of the community in TPMs member forum, The Hive, to identify stories that could be of interest to TPM readers, but exist outside the range of TPMs typical coverage areas. During the course of reporting, the students shared their progress with members for feedback and input. The project was intended to be fun, collaborative, and bring a new and valuable perspective to TPMs community. Members can read more about the project here and we would love to hear your feedback.

Will Stephen leans back in his chair, a pained smile on his face. Now in his fifth season as a writer for Saturday Night Live, Stephen admits the daily challenge of satirizing a figure as bizarre as Donald Trump a president who feels like the creation of satirists has grown stale. I feel angry or sometimes depressed more than I do ready to write or make a joke, he says.

For those outside the comedy world this may feel like a hollow complaint. In fact, Stephen says the comment he gets most about his job is, You must be having a ball with all this politics stuff. It must be so fun! But when part of your job is to point out the ridiculousness of powerful people, to subvert authority by rendering it absurd, a personality like Donald Trump can be overwhelming.

Its hard, Stephen explains. Part of the fun of political satire in the past has been mocking peoples self-seriousness getting to the truth of what politicians are trying to hide about themselves. With Bush or Palin or Al Gore or any of them, youre poking fun at something that they dont really want you to see. But with Trump, I dont know that he is that way. He just is a raw nerve. Theres not a lot hidden there in terms of who he is.

Its a sentiment many politically oriented comedians share. New York stand-up comic Boris Khaykin says Trump has been generally bad for comedy.

Whether you like the president or not, he explains, theres a bunch of stuff thats already funny about him. So its hard to do comedy about comedy. Its blue on blue it doesnt come off. And Trump is not only a target, but also a source. So many of these late-night shows, instead of writing jokes, they just play a clip [of the president] and theyre like, Can you believe it? And its like, Were three years in. I can believe it.

The ways American comedians make fun of Trump are well known and oft-repeated. They react incredulously to the wacky things he says a preferred tactic of late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, or Trevor Noah. They imitate the way he speaks, sometimes without even changing the content of his statements something SNLs Alec Baldwin-led cold opens have been criticized for. They joke about his hair, his skin color, his hands, his bankruptcies, his Twitter typos, his deference to strongmen.

Its been clear for a while that political satire in the U.S. has a Trump problem. The jokes are getting redundant, but even worse, the president seems immune to them. Even when jabs work and Trump feels compelled to respond to them, do those really count as wins? In 2016, when enough people made fun of Trumps small hands, he reacted by assuring Americans from the Republican debate stage that there was no problem with the size of his penis. The country moved on and Trump won the GOP nomination.

The English author and editor William Cook calls this phenomenon the Trump Paradox: the more you talk about something, however negatively, the more popular it becomes. As a result, much of the satire being produced about the president feels toothless and ineffective.

"

The more you talk about something, however negatively, the more popular it becomes. "

But perhaps American political satire is too focused on the president himself. As NYU Journalism graduate students from the U.S., Pakistan, Argentina, and Chile, we thought we could bring an interesting perspective to this question by examining how satire is handled in countries where a history of authoritarian(ish) leadership has forced comedians into alternative plans of attack.

Rather than coming straight at the heads of state or impersonating them, weve observed that satirists in Pakistan, Argentina, and Chile critique elements of the government and the systems that enabled leaders rise to power. They also target the people who surround and abet those leaders. In doing so, they move beyond mere roasting and make more specific, more incisive commentaries about their political circumstances.

Of course, this approach isnt unique to any particular country, and American satirists can look to it as a path worth further exploration. Some already are.Jason Adam Katzenstein, a cartoonist at The New Yorker, warns that its easy to get sucked into doing comedy just about Trump, but that doing so risks viewing the president not as a symptom of a larger system, because it probably feels better to not examine what got us here and just say, Look at this one ridiculous person.

Katzenstein says its important for him and his peers to make jokes in a way where people can direct their attention away from Trump. Having an interest in making work about that other stuff is step #1. In other words, what if satirists turned their spotlight on society and the culture surrounding Trump rather than on Trump himself?

In the spirit of examining ways to satirize that other stuff, we talked to Pakistani and South American comedians about the techniques they employ and how they fit within the American political comedy landscape.

Satire in Pakistan, marked by the subtle use of irony and symbolism, can only be understood in the context of the countrys long history of political upheaval. Since its independence from the British in 1947, Pakistan has endured several military dictatorships the most recent of which ended in 2007 while no democratically elected prime minister has completed a full term. Throughout it all, the military has remained the most powerful institution in the country, able to influence politicians and the media alike.

This has led to a substantial amount of censorship within the media, which is kept under careful watch by authorities. As a result, comedians have to be shrewd about how they approach certain issues, like military rule or Islamization. The underlying theme, of course, is a deep focus on society: questioning widespread beliefs rather than specific institutions or figures.

"

For me as an African, theres just something familiar about Trump that makes me feel at home. "

In a recent interview, Zeeshan Hussain, a producer of one of Pakistans most popular political satire shows, Khabarnaak, highlights how the programs satire is rooted in the masses. Because certain political or military subjects cant be targeted directly, satirical attention is turned toward the public. Taboo topics are creatively portrayed through distant references to everyday life, and the general public becomes the star (or villain) of the show.

We dont attack [targets] directly, Hussain explains, but we pick the characteristics of the bureaucracy and assign these attributes to our generic characters.

For instance, one of Hussains skits highlights the consequences of the governments militarism, as well as the absurdity of allocating more resources to weapons than to basic needs like education a reality that, he tells us, many in Pakistan accept. It features a jingoistic man explaining the logic behind that kind of resource allocation: if you put money into education, people become more educated and demand more jobs. But spending on weapons preserves the status quo and guarantees eternal peace. As Hussain puts it, the segment mocks how we [starve] to make bombs but then bombs are not used; theyre just shown.

Sketches like this have made Khabarnaak Pakistans most popular news-based comedy show, according to Elizabeth Bolton, who penned a recent PhD thesis on Pakistani satire at the University of Texas at Austin. Against the backdrop of political, military, or religious forces who use all resources at their disposal to muzzle criticism, Bolton writes, Hussains show has managed to play a key role in the spectrum of news and current affairs analysis.

There are certainly examples of American comedians taking an artful, subtle look at society to make a point about politics in the age of Trump. Will Stephen singles out SNLs Black Jeopardy! sketch with Tom Hanks, aired weeks before the 2016 election, as a successful commentary on the society that would go on to elect then-candidate Trump.

According to Stephen, that piece had a thesis to it, an original statement: that disaffected, ignored white American Trump supporters didnt feel all that dissimilarly to black Americans.

There was some solidarity there in terms of Weve been ignored by the elites, says Stephen. That was the thesis of it, and that wasnt a point that was being made. Whether it portrays the masses as victims or enablers, some of the best satire takes a look at society to subtly tell a bigger, harsher truth about the reality of power.

The prominent Pakistani cartoonist Sabir Nazar recognizes that every country has its own set of problems, but that they arent necessarily unique. For Nazar, that reality offers another way to satirically shed light on hidden truths: drawing international parallels. Directly comparing the situation in one country to that in another allows audiences to look at their circumstances with new eyes.

After the failed Turkish coup attempt in 2016, Nazar depicted Pakistani politicians and citizens condemning the event and expressing their support for Recep Tayyip Erdoan (see Image 1 below). But Nazar observed that many in Pakistan would have actually welcomed the kind of military rule at home that had failed in Turkey (see Image 2 below).

He wanted to point out a hypocrisy he saw among many Pakistanis when it comes to military rule: they realize martial law isnt an acceptable form of government elsewhere, yet still prefer it for their own country.

If I was making cartoons in the U.S., Nazar says, I would draw these international parallels.

Its a strategy that has met with some success in the U.S. I think John Oliver does a great job when he talks about American politics because he relates it back to other countries, says American writer Caitlin Kunkel, co-founder of The Belladonna and co-creator of The Satire and Humor Festival. Oliver, for instance, compared Trump to Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 during the Brazilian election. During the 2015 GOP primaries, Trevor Noah compared candidate Trump to African dictators. For me as an African, theres just something familiar about Trump that makes me feel at home, Noah joked.

Both segments helped American audiences better understand their own politics, and forced them to reckon with its failings.That was something that made people be like, Oh, yes, that thing where we say well never be like that, were actually getting a little closer to that, says Kunkel. More work like this would be a welcome, refreshing addition to American satire.

Down in South America, the intertwined satirical traditions of Chile and Argentina are further testaments to the effectiveness of skewering the conditions that give rise to political leaders.

In both cases, as with Pakistan, political turmoil is a key throughline. Both countries went through military dictatorships during the 1970s. Augusto Pinochets overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973 and Jorge Videlas deposal of Argentine president Isabel Pern in 1976 marked the beginning of a dark era in terms of human rights and freedom of speech. Pinochets regime lasted for 17 years and Videlas lasted seven, leaving behind strong feelings of resentment and polarization that linger today.

The transitions (back) to democracy havent been seamless. Argentina has faced a number of debt crises, the most famous of which saw five presidents come and go in just 11 days in 2001. Chile, meanwhile, is currently going through a period of serious social discontent rooted in decades of corruption and political inefficiency.

These common historical lines and sociopolitical problems have paved the way for a common satirical style, focused in large part on skewering society. Instead of throwing daggers at politicians, being able to point and laugh at themselves (and their broader communities) has become a key for many satirists and comedians.

One clear example of this is the Argentine comedian and YouTuber Guille Aquino, who produces sketches about the countrys constantly evolving social, political, and economic situation, as seen from the lives of regular people.

Aquinos sketches illustrate common, everyday situations that take bizarre, unexpected turns. Be it climate change, fake news, drug use and regulation, or local policies on garbage management, Aquinos comedy involves real people and society, rather than political leaders. He laughs about peoples hypocrisy, racism, and lack of tolerance. He makes his audience understand that the problems they usually associate with the political class are also present in themselves.

In his sketch titled Urban Violence, for instance, Aquino and a taxi driver exchange insults after a near collision. When the comedian tries to deescalate the situation, the driver stops him and says, What are you doing? Youre breaking the protocol. To Aquinos disbelief, the man explains: This is urban violence, man. This country is going to hell. You have your issues, I have mine, and we solve them by punching each other in the street. Thats how it works, right? The point Aquino makes is clear: ordinary Argentinians live in a constant state of instability, frustration, and violence.

But perhaps the most prominent feature of modern South American satire is its aggressiveness. Comedians have left behind highbrow, mannered approaches in favor of low blows, nasty images, and offensive messages. It seems the tradition of smart irony and creativity that has defined the form has lost priority to being as harsh as possible.

Baby Etchecopar, a popular far-right monologist in Argentina, has called Nicols Maduro, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara sons of bitches and pieces of shit. Meanwhile, satirical media publications like The Clinic in Chile have used aggressive and graphic imagery of ministers, presidents, and political candidates on their covers. Surely these are some of the most extreme cases, but neither Etchecopar nor The Clinic are underground or niche voices. On the contrary, they have large audiences numbering in the tens of thousands, and their commentaries usually resonate heavily on social media.

These new parameters for what is acceptable in humor have a clear origin in the recent history of dictatorships that we had to endure, says Mariano Ramos, a cartoonist and screenwriter with more than 20 years of experience making comedy in both Argentina and Chile. The fear and silence that reigned during the 1970s and 1980s were so strong that once the regimes were over, we just wanted to have fun and do whatever we wanted. We had been with a military boot on our heads for years.

"

I hate the civility argument. I think only people in power tell other people to be civil. "

Ramos points out that the shift toward a stronger, more aggressive voice was gradual and borne out of a mix of intentional efforts and coincidences. On the latter, he remembers an anecdote: During the Menem presidency, in the early 90s, I drew an extremely pornographic cartoon that got published in the youth newspaper of the leftist Partido Intransigente. Some days later, in one high school in Buenos Aires, a teenager got some homework about political parties, and in his research, he found the publication with my drawing in it. The kid brought the cartoon to school for his presentation, which resulted in him being expelled from the institution.

That small event triggered a discussion on a national level about where the limits were, and what things we were and werent able to say in this new era, he explains. The incident shows how a single piece of satire can move the sociopolitical agenda to new places. Evidently, some of the lasting scars of the dictatorships were fear and censorship dressed up as politeness and correctness. But pushing those boundaries through comedy allowed society to speak up again.

Americas current situation, while still far from any kind of authoritarian regime, might find this case useful: how a renewed sense of freedom of speech can lead to more shamelessness and frankness in political humor, and how that kind of humor can push for change.

In the U.S., few subjects are off-limits and insult comedy is an established form, so taking an aggressive approach is certainly accepted. That said, abusing politicians can get you into trouble. For instance, after Kathy Griffin posted a photo of herself holding up a Donald Trump mask made to look like a severed head, she was essentially blacklisted from Hollywood. Similarly, Samantha Bee came under fire and was forced to apologize for calling Ivanka Trump a feckless c***. Even cartoonist Michael de Adder was fired from a Canadian publication for drawing a graphic caricature of Trump golfing near the dead bodies of migrants. The piece made a strong statement about American immigration practices, which was the point, but a cartoonist in another country had to pay the price for it because many in the U.S. felt it crossed a line.

But aggressive satire not only forces the audience to face harsh realities; it also incites an emotional response and challenges the powerful. As Kunkel puts it, I hate the civility argument. I think only people in power tell other people to be civil. Obviously I dont want to incite violence, but there comes a point where its like, if someones doing terrible things and is a huge hypocrite, to protect their image is [dumb]. You have to go past that.

In the age of Trump, avoiding satire about the president is impossible. As the leader of the free world, he warrants coverage, and his personality and actions provide worthy material to comedians. But the amount of satirical attention being paid to Trump feels skewed. If the aim of satirists, as Ramos suggests, is to take a stand, listen, and work to help their fellow citizens understand the times they are living in, then repeatedly fixating on the same tired jokes about Trump isnt going to do the trick.

The satirical landscapes in our home countries, focused less on leaders and more on the conditions that give rise to them, offer a glimpse of what American satirists might try more of. After all, the targets of Pakistani, Chilean, and Argentinian satire polarization, inequality, hypocrisy, disillusionment are not unique to those countries; they exist in their own ways in the U.S. too. A more society-focused approach to satire might force Americans to look inward and reckon with Trump not as a cause, but a symptom of problems of their own making.

Asked about the future of satire in the Trump era, Kunkel expresses cautious optimism. I dont think its impossible to create good work, she says. Satirists can confront Trump. But you often cant come at it straight on or just do an impression, Kunkel continues. You have to critique the people around him, elements of the administration. You have to find more creative ways to pull apart whats going on. Because its not just him, right?

KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING:What foreign country or satirist do you think American satirists can learn the most from? Let us know in the comments.

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Satire In The US Has A Trump Problem - TPM

The Lincoln Project takes on Trump and possibly Maines Susan Collins – The Boston Globe

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If that doesnt happen, Horn said, then, yes, unfortunately, Senator Collins becomes part of this, a Lincoln Project target.

The project is one of several small, but vocal, rebellions against Trump, who has taken over the national Republican Party apparatus and rarely experiences pushback from its members in Congress.

Collins, who has walked a tightrope through roiling partisan politics, has said little about how she intends to vote in the Senates expected impeachment trial of Trump. Long known as an independent thinker, Collins infuriated members of her party when she helped kill the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But she faced criticism from Democrats when she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaughs nomination to the Supreme Court.

Collins, in a statement, offered few clues about how she might vote in an impeachment trial. I intend to make my decision on whether or not to convict President Trump on the basis of the evidence presented at the trial, she said. Threats from both the left and the right will have zero influence on that decision.

Trump has remained steadily popular among Republicans across the country, despite his overall low approval ratings and his impeachment last week by the House, all of which makes the Lincoln Projects effort an uphill battle.

When the House voted to impeach Trump for trying to pressure the president of Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden a potential Trump challenger in 2020 not a single Republican joined the Democratic majority. In some states, the GOP has maneuvered to keep Trumps primary challengers off the 2020 ballot altogether.

Nonetheless, the Lincoln Project, unveiled in a New York Times op-ed the day before the House impeached Trump, describes the president as a bogus prophet, whose actions threaten the Constitution and American way of life.

We do not undertake this task lightly, nor from ideological preference, said the op-ed authors and Lincoln Project cofounders, who include George T. Conway III, an attorney known as an outspoken Trump critic and husband of presidential adviser Kelleyanne Conway.

Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain, but our shared fidelity to the Constitution dictates a common effort, they wrote.

They envision persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans, and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to vote against Trump and his supporters even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.

Joshua Tardy, a Maine attorney who served as honorary chairman for Collinss last Senate campaign, dismissed the projects goals and chances of success. There will be a lot of noise makers on both sides and this super PAC will just be another noise maker in a noisy election, Tardy said. (Such political action committees can raise funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups without any limit on donation size or expenditure.)

Collins recently announced she will run for reelection. And while she hasnt said whether she will endorse Trump, the president this week indicated his support for her via Twitter. When Senator Lindsey Graham encouraged voters to support Collinss reelection, Trump responded: I agree 100%.

Horn, from the Lincoln Project, said her group raised over $500,000 in the two days after it was announced.

The groups day-to-day activities will be overseen by Horn, who twice ran for Congress from New Hampshire, and by Reed Galen, a longtime Republican strategist. Other members include two former strategists for the late Senator John McCain, Steve Schmidt and John Weaver.

Maine is considered a battleground state in 2020. Thats partly because its electorate is divided and unpredictable: The state has a Republican senator, an independent senator, and two Democratic members of the House. The current Democratic governor followed a provocative Republican. Maine is also a key electoral state because it is one of just two (the other is Nebraska) that does not use the traditional winner-take-all method of allocating Electoral College votes. Trump won one of the states four votes in 2016, the first time a Republican took any of Maines votes in decades.

Tardy is not worried.

At the end of the day, Donald Trump and Susan Collins enjoy enormous support by their Republican base, he said.

The Lincoln Project is also focusing on candidates in other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and Arizona.

Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld, who is challenging Trump for the presidential nomination, said he is focused on beating Trump, but not on targeting other Republicans.

He said, however, that he agreed with the projects mission of defeating Trump.

I am delighted to see a little hardball on the side of the nice guys, Weld said.

He draws parallels to 1973, when, he said, he was an ambitious young lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee and was advised by others in the Republican Party to steer clear of the impeachment process because of Richard Nixons popularity, despite the Watergate break-in.

Nixon ultimately resigned in 1974 before the House voted on impeachment, as evidence against him mounted and support from loyal congressional defenders dissolved. Weld believes those who stand by Trump in a Senate trial will suffer politically.

If the Republicans in the Senate walk the plank silently for Mr. Trump, all of those who are up next year in the 2020 election will lose their seats, he said.

Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina governor and congressman who ended his long-shot campaign for the Republican nomination against Trump last month, had not heard of the Lincoln Project. But Sanford, a fiscal conservative, said he wished the founders well. I think we need to have a conversation as Republicans as to what it means to be a Republican, Sanford said. We have lost our way ... based on a temporary political amnesia that will fade.

Kay Lazar can be reached at kay.lazar@globe.com Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKayLazar.

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The Lincoln Project takes on Trump and possibly Maines Susan Collins - The Boston Globe

Trump gains support among millionaires but would lose to Biden in head-to-head, CNBC survey finds – CNBC

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President Donald Trump gestures toward journalists shouting questions as he departs the White House May 29, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

President Donald Trump is the favorite candidate of America's millionaires and his support seems to be strengthening. But there is a catch: in a head-to-head match up he would lose to Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the next Presidential election.

Asked which candidate they support for president in 2020, 36% of millionaires named Trump, up from 32% in May, according to the Q4 CNBC Millionaire Survey. The second-favorite candidate is former Vice President Joe Biden, with 14%. Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in third, with 8%. The survey was conducted before Michael Bloomberg entered the race.

Millionaire support for Trump has also grown over the past three years. In mid-2016, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by 13 points among millionaires. Of millionaires today who have donated to a campaign, the largest number 39% have donated to Trump.

Still, their support for Trump and their all-important donor dollars depends in large part on who he faces in 2020. When asked who they would support in one-to-one match-ups, Joe Biden beats Trump 48% to 41%, according to the survey. Biden would even get 18% of Republican millionaire votes in a Trump-Biden match-up.

The only other Democratic candidate who beats Trump among millionaires is Pete Buttigieg, who edges past Trump 46% to 43%. Trump easily beats both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren among millionaires.

While the most popular answer from respondents on the question of the issue they will vote on in 2020 was voting Trump out of office, representing 29% of survey takers, that illustrates the extreme partisan divide consistent with past surveys. It was 32% in the Spring 2019 Millionaire Survey. Other issues typically popular with Republican voters split support, including the economy (17%), immigration (10%), "draining the swamp" (7%) and taxes/government spending (6%).

The main reason millionaires back Trump is the economy. Nearly half say he is good for the economy, versus a third who say Biden would be good for the economy. More than 60% said Sanders and Warren would be bad for the economy.

"The race is so fluid right now," said George Walper, president of Spectrem Group. "The only constant is Trump."

Walper said that 20 years ago, millionaires would have been much more predominantly Republican. But today they are more reflective of an evenly divided American public.

Democratic presidential hopefuls Former Vice President Joe Biden (L) and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren arrive onstage for the fourth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season co-hosted by The New York Times and CNN at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio on October 15, 2019.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

"Geography and who they are is more important than wealth when it comes to their political views," he said.

Millionaires remain cautious on the economy and markets for next year. A third think the economy will be the same, while 40% say it will be weaker and 28% say it will be stronger. Democratic millionaires are far more pessimistic, with 62% saying it will be weaker.

On the stock market, the largest number 38% say the S&P 500 will be up 5% to 10% next year, with 19% predicting it will be even stronger and 20% predicting it will be flat.

The CNBC Millionaire survey polls more than 700 respondents with investible assets of $1 million or more, including 301 Republicans, 200 Democrats and 247 independents. Respondents had to be the financial decision-maker or share jointly in financial decision-making within the household. The survey is conducted twice a year, in the spring and fall.

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Trump gains support among millionaires but would lose to Biden in head-to-head, CNBC survey finds - CNBC