Good morning,
Welcome to MS NOW’s Sunday Spotlight, where you can find a selection of the week’s most interesting and important stories. President Donald Trump is stuck between Iran and a hard place. Meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers can’t manage some of their most basic tasks, an upcoming fight at the White House has an unnerving subtext and the administration is bringing back a dangerous idea for nuclear energy. Plus, a reality TV reunion shows what’s wrong with America.
Don’t forget to check out more top columns and videos from the week below.
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Deal or no deal: Whether the United States and Iran agree on a supposedly impending ceasefire and begin negotiations, Trump has already lost, argues Michael A. Cohen. None of the administration’s prewar goals have been achieved, whether that’s stopping a nuclear weapons program, the existence of which lacked evidence; damaging its conventional military and missile capabilities; or changing the regime. More embarrassing is that one of the key U.S. objectives — reopening the Strait of Hormuz — is “only necessary because of the war itself,” he writes. Read more.
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Grand standing: Obtaining an indictment from a grand jury is not supposed to be hard. Prosecutors merely need to convince a panel of citizens that they have enough evidence to proceed to a trial. But under Trump, federal prosecutors have had a series of embarrassing grand jury rejections and judicial admonishments, showing how much the Justice Department’s reputation has suffered, argues Hayes Brown. Part of the blame goes to the fact that the administration has named so many inexperienced lawyers as U.S. attorneys, but the real problem is that Trump’s demand for politicized prosecutions has forced them to play a weak hand. Read more.
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Ultimate monstrosity: A giant pair of domed, star-spangled arches appear to be sprouting out of the South Lawn of the White House ahead of an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight scheduled on Trump’s birthday, June 14. But Trump’s decision to have a UFC match, rather than any other sport or performing art, isn’t random or politically neutral, argues Zeeshan Aleem. In fact, there is a “growing right-wing subculture within MMA sports and fandom, which goes back more than a decade,” while Trump has long had an alliance with UFC CEO Dana White. Read more.
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Nuclear startups: The Trump administration wants to give startup companies surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs. That’s not only a bad idea, but it’s not even a new one, argues Joseph Cirincione. In the 1970s, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter nixed similar proposals over concerns that the risks of letting private companies use and store large amounts of plutonium would be a tempting target for terrorists or states looking to steal or even buy the small amounts they would need for a bomb. That’s not to mention the history of failed attempts to build small plutonium-fueled reactors that are expensive, complex and prone to shutdowns. Read more.
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Reality bites: A reunion of the long-running Bravo reality show “Summer House,” which follows a group of friends sharing a house in the Hamptons, reveals a lot about American culture right now, argues Hannah Holland. At the center of the three-part series is a salacious relationship among two cast members who were attached to other people at the time, which they both have confirmed and downplayed. Ultimately, the show primes viewers to tolerate the contradiction and prioritize a tidy narrative, a tendency that is playing out in politics, especially with former reality TV stars turned pols, such as Trump, Sean Duffy and Spencer Pratt. Read more.
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At the age of 38, when she was 22 weeks pregnant and so sick she could barely get out of bed, Jenney Bitner went to the ER, where a scan revealed a baseball-sized tumor in her brain. A pediatric occupational therapist, Bitner was so sure she was going to die that she wrote letters to each of her children telling them things she wanted them to know — ”the things a mother is supposed to say in person, over the years, that I might never get the chance to say.” But a combination immunotherapy regimen — two drugs, given together every three weeks — left her with no evidence of cancer anywhere in her body. The drug therapy stemmed from decades of federally funded research into the immune system, the kind of “painstaking long-horizon science” that the Trump administration now wants to cut. “This country made a long bet on science, and I’m alive because it paid off,” Bitner argues. Read the column here.
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