Tag: trump presidency

A 1978 War Game Shows How We Weren’t Designed to Survive Trump

Mike Rothschild

During October 1978, the US spent a month practicing World War III.

The military portion of the plan was given the jaunty codename “Nifty Nugget,” and when paired with a civilian plan called “Readiness Exercise 78,” represented the first ever computerized, nuclear age exercise to test the nation’s ability to mobilize for war in Europe, fight in the field, move equipment and troops, and absorb the damage and casualties that would occur when the conflict went nuclear.

It was a fiasco, and showed that if war broke out, we’d be utterly screwed.

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Trump, the NFL, and the Streisand Effect

Mike Rothschild

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued a photographer taking pictures for an endeavor called the California Coastal Records project. Meant to document the erosion of the state’s beaches, the CCRP took one photo approximately every 500 feet all up and down California’s coast.

One of those pictures showed a particularly ritzy part of the Malibu coast, which happened to house Streisand’s mansion. The picture had been downloaded six times before Streisand’s suit, which alleged that the CCRP had violated her privacy, demanded the image be suppressed. The publicity brought by the suit brought a massive spotlight to the image, and it was downloaded nearly half-a-million times over the next month. In attempting to erase the image, Streisand brought it far more attention than it ever would have had otherwise.

This “Streisand Effect” is now cited whenever an attempt to stamp out information only makes that information more available.

Over the weekend, President Trump employed a version of the Streisand Effect to bring a massive spotlight to something that, before, had almost totally faded away from the public eye: NFL players taking a knee during the singing of the National Anthem.

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The Shape of Pardonpaloozas to Come

Mike Rothschild

A “constitutional crisis” is generally defined as a problem for which a country’s founding documents don’t contain a solution, or they do, and the solution is ignored.

Five Thirty Eight breaks down this concept even more, delineating four types of American constitutional crises: when the Constitution doesn’t say what to do, when it does but in an unclear way, when it does but it’s not feasible or possible, and when it does and the institutions meant to enforce that solution are bypassed.

Pundits have been predicting a Donald Trump administration constitutional crisis since day one, from his flouting of the emoluments clause to his firing of former FBI director James Comey, to the potential firing of Robert Mueller.

But with Trump’s pardon of loathsome former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted of contempt of court for refusing to stop violating the constitutional rights of Latinos, we likely got a glimpse of the constitutional crisis to come.

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