newyorker--2020-10-24--Will Trump’s “Law and Order” Message Work in Wisconsin?

According to Nancy Kormanik , the president of the Republican Women of Waukesha County , there are now more Trump supporters in the WOW counties than in 2016 .
Kormanik , a seventy-three-year-old retired secretary , admitted that she , too , had been reluctant to vote for him .
“ I really didn ’ t believe him , ” Kormanik told me .
Dozens of her friends left the Presidential bracket on their ballots blank because they were unsure whether Trump was a real conservative .
“ I mean , he didn ’ t play his whole deck , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ took a gamble on him.
” This year , however , she assured me that every last one of her friends would vote for Trump , and do so eagerly .
“ He has delivered , over and above , ” she said .
“ They do believe his performance has been incredible.
” As suburban areas across the country have become more diverse , more educated , and more Democratic , the WOW counties , the story goes , remain a bright red firewall .
In 2014 , Craig Gilbert , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worked with Charles Franklin , a Marquette University pollster , to do an extensive survey of the region .
Wisconsin ’ s contentious governor , Scott Walker , who had recently survived a recall election , had an approval rating in the area of ninety-two per cent among Republicans .
More than half of WOW-county residents lived in neighborhoods that Romney won by thirty per cent or more .
The gap between Obama ’ s support in urban Milwaukee County and the surrounding suburbs , meanwhile , was the second largest in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In southeastern Wisconsin , ” Gilbert wrote , “ you ’ ll find the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation.
” In early October , Terry Dittrich , the chairman of the Republican Party of Waukesha County , invited me to the Party office , squeezed inside a strip mall off State Highway 59 , between a vegan-dietary-supplements store and a house-painting business .
A flier taped to the door was addressed to uninvited journalists : “ NO FILMING , NO PHOTOS , NO INTERVIEWS.
” Inside , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Dittrich was in isolation upstairs .
He is a long-time Waukesha Republican , a native of Madison and an adviser at an international bank .
Given that the county is so reliably Republican , I wondered whether the remaining weeks of the campaign might be fairly relaxed for him .
“ Let ’ s put it this way , ” Dittrich said .
“ Waukesha is going red .
I don ’ t think anybody would think we ’ re not .
It ’ s just a question of what those margins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago owing to a confluence of factors , but a big one was depressed Democratic turnout in Milwaukee County .
Dittrich does not expect that to happen again .
To win this time , Trump needs to boost his numbers .
One strategy has been to focus on the outer edges of Waukesha County , where the population is less dense .
Dittrich is encountering a lot of new faces out there .
“ If you ask them , ‘ Are you pro-Republican ?
, ’ they ’ ll either say maybe or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But if you say to them , “ Are you anti-swamp ?
’ “ Yes.
’ ‘ Why do you want to vote ?
’ ‘ Because I love Trump.
’ ” He added , “ I don ’ t know how you would model or identify these people in normal polling.
” Other indicators are less encouraging for Dittrich .
According to recent surveys by the New York Times and Siena College , Trump is trailing Biden by an average of twenty-three points among suburban women in swing states .
In 2018 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who became a vocal supporter , suffered a drop in support in the Milwaukee suburbs , his home turf , and ultimately lost his reëlection bid .
Dittrich told me that the outcome was , in part , owing to the wavering support of young moms who thought that Walker ’ s opponent , the former schools-superintendent Tony Evers , would boost education .
“ The bottom line is we did see a weakness among younger women , ” Dittrich told me .
These were “ women that are in a district that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t go red.
” Those districts are the inner suburbs that border Milwaukee , where younger women are invested in what ’ s happening in the city on issues like school funding , environmental policy , and social justice .
Reclaiming these suburban women as reliable voters for Trump , and for the Republican Party , is key to the campaign ’ s chances in Wisconsin .
“ We won ’ t make that mistake again , ” Dittrich said , “ of not paying attention to them , talking to them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are , finding out what made them think differently the last election cycle.
” The parties are also using local elections as a proxy war for the Presidency .
The Fourteenth District , which lies partly in Waukesha County and partly in Milwaukee County , is the site of a scorched-earth campaign for the State Assembly seat .
Both parties are running moderate middle-aged women with children in local schools who are familiar faces to moms in the area .
“ So that ’ s where we are , ” Dittrich said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ between two pretty good candidates.
” Trump , who has a campaign event scheduled in Waukesha on Saturday , has his own ideas about winning those women back .
A week earlier , at a rally in Janesville , he told a crowd at Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport that the “ most menacing aspect of the Biden-Harris agenda is their attack of [ sic ] law and order.
” “ Today I want to explain to you the threat that their far-left plans pose to the safety of your family , your community @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ If you give the power to Democrats , the radical left will defund , disband , disarm , and dismantle police departments all across America.
” I asked Dittrich whether he thought Trump ’ s law-and-order messaging was working with women voters in the WOW counties .
He conceded some skepticism .
“ Are they concerned enough , or do they believe somehow this violence is justified ?
” he said , referring to women who might sympathize with the goals of Black Lives Matter .
“ I don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least some of these voters felt threatened : “ You definitely get the feeling that people are on edge .
They ’ re looking around and saying , ‘ Holy cow , we ’ re next.
’ ” In addition to all its other ruinous effects , segregation breeds stark political polarization .
“ There ’ s really good political science research on the social psychology of segregation , ” Katherine Levine Einstein , a political scientist at Boston University , told me .
“ Once you ’ re in a segregated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white people in those communities , and entrench that segregation.
” Some pollsters have observed that extreme segregation “ radicalizes ” white voters .
Einstein is from Milwaukee , and recalled a years-long battle that took place after Waukesha discovered elevated radium levels in the area ’ s drinking water .
The easiest solution would have been to pay the city of Milwaukee for access to water from Lake Michigan .
But the residents of Waukesha would do just about anything to avoid giving their money to Milwaukee .
“ They would rather @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Einstein said .
Over the summer , Wauwatosa , a stately , old , white middle-class suburb , was the site of ongoing demonstrations against Joseph Mensah , a Black police officer who shot and killed three young men , two of them Black and one Native American and Latino , over the last five years .
In February , Mensah killed seventeen-year-old Alvin Cole in the parking lot of Mayfair Mall , and over the summer , in anticipation of a ruling on the case , demonstrators repeatedly showed up at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ resulted in a scuffle in which shots were fired and three people were arrested for assault .
In early October , the Milwaukee County District Attorney announced that Mensah would not be charged in Cole ’ s death .
As protests broke out in Wauwatosa , the Governor deployed the National Guard , which set up a staging ground in the Mayfair Mall parking lot .
The city issued a curfew , enabling riot police to make arrests .
Among the protesters rounded up were Alvin Cole ’ s mother and two sisters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s downtown were smashed , and the police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets on multiple evenings .
I asked Dittrich what he was hearing from constituents .
“ Very concerned , ” he said .
He complained about the violent faction that had aligned itself with otherwise responsible Democrats .
I brought up the violent fringe that had aligned itself with the right .
Dittrich took a breath .
“ They are not burning down cities , ” he said , bringing his fist down on the table .
“ They are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glass and car windows , and going around cities indiscriminately threatening people .
Please tell me where.
” Kenosha is an hour ’ s drive south of Milwaukee .
In August , after Jacob Blake was shot by Rusten Sheskey , a Kenosha police officer , demonstrations spilled out into the city ’ s streets and became destructive , resulting in multiple local businesses being burned down .
Kyle Rittenhouse , a seventeen-year-old from Illinois , drove up as a self-appointed and illegally-armed defender of local properties ; he is now charged with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( In Janesville , Trump had asked the crowd , “ You ever hear of a place called Kenosha ?
Because if I didn ’ t get involved , there would be no Kenosha right now.
” ) Dittrich told me that he and other Republicans in the area would not pass judgment on Rittenhouse until due process was done .
“ If there ’ s an isolated case where you have a person who goes crazy and goes shooting people , first of all , they ’ re subject to arrest .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ many anti-discriminatory laws in this country that are going to send that guy up the river for a long time , ” Dittrich said .
Still , he added , it might turn out that Rittenhouse had acted within the limits of the law , in self-defense .
A couple of weeks after Rittenhouse ’ s arrest , his mother attended an event sponsored by the Republican Women of Waukesha County , where she received a standing ovation .
“ I think I can safely say that 97 % of the households in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told me , “ and they will use them.
” Robin Moore , a former president of the Republican Women of Waukesha County , who ran unsuccessfully for the Fourteenth District seat two years ago , told me that Black Lives Matter had put out a schedule of protests planned in around twenty Wisconsin towns this summer .
“ We know it was meant as intimidation , ” Moore said .
Most , in the end , remained small .
“ I think they knew , had they shown up in force , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made sure that it stayed peaceful , ” she said .
“ It would have been handled .
Luckily , we never really had to find out.
” Moore , who is fifty-seven , works as an executive wine consultant and resides in Brookfield , a wealthy , serene town in eastern Waukesha County .
She lamented that the governor—despite having sent in the National Guard there as well—had aligned himself with looters in Kenosha .
She said there was concern that , if the wrong people got into office and reduced funding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be affected .
“ They ’ ve seen what happens when we don ’ t have police on the street , we ’ ve already been through that , especially in Milwaukee , ” Moore said .
“ So whether Joe Biden is aligned with them or not , it does shine a light on the Democrat Party , at least from the elected officials we have here in Wisconsin .
They seem to want to stand with those who want to tear down our cities , rather than build them up.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School , is writing a book about the Fair Housing Act in the nineteen-sixties .
“ Civil disorder in 1968 helped Richard Nixon a lot , especially when there was violence , ” Orfield told me , “ but it feels like the polling is different now .
A lot of white people see this differently than they did in the sixties.
” His data suggest that people now are much more ambivalent , more likely to see both sides , and , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they may also agree with black grievances and believe in a need for reform .
“ I don ’ t think the violence ever helps , I think it hurts the Democrats , ” Orfield said .
“ In those really white suburbs of Milwaukee , I wouldn ’ t be surprised ” if people are scared , he noted , “ but I think they ’ re already kind of built into Trump ’ s base.
” Compared to 2016 , when the Party gave out about seven or eight hundred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were now nearly four thousand Biden signs circulating in Waukesha County .
“ If you would have told me in 2016 that there would be four thousand people who are willing to tell their neighbors that they ’ re Democrats , ” Mareno said , “ I would have laughed in your face.
” He has encountered other forms of support , too .
“ We ’ ll be phone-banking , and we ’ ll call a house , and a husband will pick up , and we ’ ll be , like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
’ ” Mareno said .
“ And they ’ ll be like , ‘ She doesn ’ t want to talk to you.
’ And then we get a call back an hour later being like ” —he switched into a whisper— “ ‘ I ’ m voting for Biden , but my husband , he ’ s a big Trump supporter.
’ I ’ m , like , Oh , cool .
Shy Biden voter .
”

The counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington—known, collectively, as the WOW counties—compose the bungalow belt of the city of Milwaukee, a suburban sprawl of Craftsman-style homes clustered neatly among dozens of lakes. Waukesha County, the largest of the three is, according to one analysis, the best performing Republican suburb in America. Although Republicans failed to win Wisconsin in the 2012 Presidential election, Waukesha delivered the highest turnout in the nation for Mitt Romney—Ozaukee and Washington were the third and fourth highest. But in 2016, when Trump secured a surprise victory in the state by a margin of twenty-two thousand votes, something peculiar happened. A post-mortem map compiled by the G.O.P. revealed that in a strip of counties running up the eastern edge of the state, from Kenosha to the Door Peninsula, and passing through the WOW counties, Trump underperformed Ron Johnson, Wisconsin’s Republican senator. One of the greatest discrepancies was in Waukesha County, where Johnson bested Trump by an eleven-point margin. That’s nearly twenty thousand votes that should have easily gone to Trump.
According to Nancy Kormanik, the president of the Republican Women of Waukesha County, there are now more Trump supporters in the WOW counties than in 2016. Kormanik, a seventy-three-year-old retired secretary, admitted that she, too, had been reluctant to vote for him. “I really didn’t believe him,” Kormanik told me. Dozens of her friends left the Presidential bracket on their ballots blank because they were unsure whether Trump was a real conservative. “I mean, he didn’t play his whole deck,” she said. “People literally took a gamble on him.” This year, however, she assured me that every last one of her friends would vote for Trump, and do so eagerly. “He has delivered, over and above,” she said. “They do believe his performance has been incredible.”
As suburban areas across the country have become more diverse, more educated, and more Democratic, the WOW counties, the story goes, remain a bright red firewall. In 2014, Craig Gilbert, a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, worked with Charles Franklin, a Marquette University pollster, to do an extensive survey of the region. Wisconsin’s contentious governor, Scott Walker, who had recently survived a recall election, had an approval rating in the area of ninety-two per cent among Republicans. More than half of WOW-county residents lived in neighborhoods that Romney won by thirty per cent or more. The gap between Obama’s support in urban Milwaukee County and the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, was the second largest in the country, after New Orleans. “In southeastern Wisconsin,” Gilbert wrote, “you’ll find the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation.”
In early October, Terry Dittrich, the chairman of the Republican Party of Waukesha County, invited me to the Party office, squeezed inside a strip mall off State Highway 59, between a vegan-dietary-supplements store and a house-painting business. A flier taped to the door was addressed to uninvited journalists: “NO FILMING, NO PHOTOS, NO INTERVIEWS.” Inside, several elderly people milled around without masks. Dittrich was in isolation upstairs. He is a long-time Waukesha Republican, a native of Madison and an adviser at an international bank. Given that the county is so reliably Republican, I wondered whether the remaining weeks of the campaign might be fairly relaxed for him. “Let’s put it this way,” Dittrich said. “Waukesha is going red. I don’t think anybody would think we’re not. It’s just a question of what those margins are.”
Trump won Wisconsin four years ago owing to a confluence of factors, but a big one was depressed Democratic turnout in Milwaukee County. Dittrich does not expect that to happen again. To win this time, Trump needs to boost his numbers. One strategy has been to focus on the outer edges of Waukesha County, where the population is less dense. Dittrich is encountering a lot of new faces out there. “If you ask them, ‘Are you pro-Republican?,’ they’ll either say maybe or no,” Dittrich said. “But if you say to them, “Are you anti-swamp?’ “Yes.’ ‘Why do you want to vote?’ ‘Because I love Trump.’ ” He added, “I don’t know how you would model or identify these people in normal polling.”
Other indicators are less encouraging for Dittrich. According to recent surveys by the New York Times and Siena College, Trump is trailing Biden by an average of twenty-three points among suburban women in swing states. In 2018, Walker, another early Trump holdout who became a vocal supporter, suffered a drop in support in the Milwaukee suburbs, his home turf, and ultimately lost his reëlection bid. Dittrich told me that the outcome was, in part, owing to the wavering support of young moms who thought that Walker’s opponent, the former schools-superintendent Tony Evers, would boost education. “The bottom line is we did see a weakness among younger women,” Dittrich told me. These were “women that are in a district that should absolutely be going red and didn’t go red.”
Those districts are the inner suburbs that border Milwaukee, where younger women are invested in what’s happening in the city on issues like school funding, environmental policy, and social justice. Reclaiming these suburban women as reliable voters for Trump, and for the Republican Party, is key to the campaign’s chances in Wisconsin. “We won’t make that mistake again,” Dittrich said, “of not paying attention to them, talking to them, finding out what their real issues are, finding out what made them think differently the last election cycle.”
The parties are also using local elections as a proxy war for the Presidency. The Fourteenth District, which lies partly in Waukesha County and partly in Milwaukee County, is the site of a scorched-earth campaign for the State Assembly seat. Both parties are running moderate middle-aged women with children in local schools who are familiar faces to moms in the area. “So that’s where we are,” Dittrich said. “We have a real dog fight between two pretty good candidates.”
Trump, who has a campaign event scheduled in Waukesha on Saturday, has his own ideas about winning those women back. A week earlier, at a rally in Janesville, he told a crowd at Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport that the “most menacing aspect of the Biden-Harris agenda is their attack of [sic] law and order.” “Today I want to explain to you the threat that their far-left plans pose to the safety of your family, your community, and your country,” he said. “If you give the power to Democrats, the radical left will defund, disband, disarm, and dismantle police departments all across America.”
I asked Dittrich whether he thought Trump’s law-and-order messaging was working with women voters in the WOW counties. He conceded some skepticism. “Are they concerned enough, or do they believe somehow this violence is justified?” he said, referring to women who might sympathize with the goals of Black Lives Matter. “I don’t know.” But he suggested that at least some of these voters felt threatened: “You definitely get the feeling that people are on edge. They’re looking around and saying, ‘Holy cow, we’re next.’ ”
Terry Dittrich, the chairman of the Republican Party of Waukesha County, believes that reclaiming suburban women as reliable voters for Trump is key to the campaign’s chances in Wisconsin. Photograph by Brian Snyder / Reuters
Milwaukee was my family’s Lower East Side, a hub of immigrant commerce where my great-grandparents arrived from Eastern Europe as teen-agers, sometime in the nineteen-tens. The city’s storefronts and places of worship were repurposed every few decades, by Germans, East-European Jews, Poles, and Latinos, with each successive generation adding a layer, like rings inside a tree. The Great Migration from the South came decades late in Milwaukee, not reaching its peak until the nineteen-seventies, when industry had already begun shedding jobs. The city’s Black middle class remained small, its economic frustrations compounded by vicious racism, both of which prevented them from moving out to the suburbs. Today, the city of Milwaukee is thirty-nine per cent Black. But the statistics in its suburbs remain astounding: across the Waukesha county line immediately to the west, every incorporated township is less than three per cent Black.
In addition to all its other ruinous effects, segregation breeds stark political polarization. “There’s really good political science research on the social psychology of segregation,” Katherine Levine Einstein, a political scientist at Boston University, told me. “Once you’re in a segregated place, you change the attitudes of white people in those communities, and entrench that segregation.” Some pollsters have observed that extreme segregation“radicalizes” white voters. Einstein is from Milwaukee, and recalled a years-long battle that took place after Waukesha discovered elevated radium levels in the area’s drinking water. The easiest solution would have been to pay the city of Milwaukee for access to water from Lake Michigan. But the residents of Waukesha would do just about anything to avoid giving their money to Milwaukee. “They would rather drink the water containing carcinogenic chemicals,” Einstein said.
Over the summer, Wauwatosa, a stately, old, white middle-class suburb, was the site of ongoing demonstrations against Joseph Mensah, a Black police officer who shot and killed three young men, two of them Black and one Native American and Latino, over the last five years. In February, Mensah killed seventeen-year-old Alvin Cole in the parking lot of Mayfair Mall, and over the summer, in anticipation of a ruling on the case, demonstrators repeatedly showed up at Mensah’s home. One occasion resulted in a scuffle in which shots were fired and three people were arrested for assault. In early October, the Milwaukee County District Attorney announced that Mensah would not be charged in Cole’s death. As protests broke out in Wauwatosa, the Governor deployed the National Guard, which set up a staging ground in the Mayfair Mall parking lot. The city issued a curfew, enabling riot police to make arrests. Among the protesters rounded up were Alvin Cole’s mother and two sisters. Several shop windows in Wauwatosa’s downtown were smashed, and the police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets on multiple evenings.
I asked Dittrich what he was hearing from constituents. “Very concerned,” he said. He complained about the violent faction that had aligned itself with otherwise responsible Democrats. I brought up the violent fringe that had aligned itself with the right. Dittrich took a breath. “They are not burning down cities,” he said, bringing his fist down on the table. “They are not indiscriminately going up and pounding out glass and car windows, and going around cities indiscriminately threatening people. Please tell me where.”
Kenosha is an hour’s drive south of Milwaukee. In August, after Jacob Blake was shot by Rusten Sheskey, a Kenosha police officer, demonstrations spilled out into the city’s streets and became destructive, resulting in multiple local businesses being burned down. Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from Illinois, drove up as a self-appointed and illegally-armed defender of local properties; he is now charged with shooting three people, two fatally. (In Janesville, Trump had asked the crowd, “You ever hear of a place called Kenosha? Because if I didn’t get involved, there would be no Kenosha right now.”) Dittrich told me that he and other Republicans in the area would not pass judgment on Rittenhouse until due process was done. “If there’s an isolated case where you have a person who goes crazy and goes shooting people, first of all, they’re subject to arrest. Second of all, we have so many anti-discriminatory laws in this country that are going to send that guy up the river for a long time,” Dittrich said. Still, he added, it might turn out that Rittenhouse had acted within the limits of the law, in self-defense.


newyorker--2020-10-25--Trump’s Bitter, Vainglorious Fantasy of America on the Debate Stage

The America that Donald Trump described in his debate with Joe Biden last Thursday night is a strangely destructible place—one that might , in a blink , disappear .
In an exchange about covid-19 , Trump said , “ We can ’ t close up our nation , or you ’ re not going to have a nation.
” After a few minutes , he repeated that warning , saying , “ We have to open our country—we ’ re not going to have a country.
” This is not a new move for Trump : the list of things @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Americans won ’ t have a country includes a border wall , steel , petroleum , eminent domain , and his reëlection .
Later in the debate , he noted that , if a President Biden secured a public option for health care , “ this whole country will come down.
” Whether Trump wins or loses on November 3rd , Thursday night was almost certainly the last time that he will appear on a debate stage .
He used the occasion to present a bitter , vainglorious fantasy of America , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As always , he added a dose of conspiracy theories— “ All of the e-mails , the e-mails , the horrible e-mails !
” —in an attempt to leave people perplexed about the truth .
In contrast with the first Presidential debate , he more or less obeyed the time limits ( enforced by microphone muting ) and didn ’ t try to shout down Biden or the moderator , Kristen Welker , which mainly showed that he can prevaricate calmly .
One of his bigger lies was that many of America ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what he called “ badly run , high-crime , Democrat—all run by Democrat—cities and states.
” Biden ’ s challenge , which he navigated fairly well , was that Trump lies in a manner that is so unanchored to reality that it becomes disorienting .
Never mind , for example , that the Trump Administration ’ s lawyers are heading to the Supreme Court in two weeks to argue that the entire Affordable Care Act , including its protections for people with preëxisting conditions , should be thrown out , and that Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ replace it .
When asked what he would do , he replied , simply , that “ preëxisting conditions will always stay.
” As for the more than five hundred children taken from their families at the border whose parents the government now can ’ t find , he said that their plight was the fault of “ coyotes , ” “ cartels , ” and “ gangs.
” On the subject of race , he repeated that he had done more for Black Americans than anybody with the “ possible exception ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ falsehoods are always harmful , but distinctly so when it comes to the pandemic .
The coronavirus , as it is often said , does not respect party or state lines , and because it is so highly infectious confronting it requires a unified community effort .
Cases are rising in a majority of states ; the official toll of dead Americans is approaching a quarter of a million , and will perhaps reach four hundred thousand by the end of the year—numbers that Biden said should , by themselves , disqualify Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic is entering “ a dangerous new phase.
” Not in Trump ’ s view .
He insisted that any spikes will soon dissipate— “ It ’ s going away ” —and added that anyone who has doubts about his timeline for distributing a vaccine by the end of the year just doesn ’ t share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done .
The President used the debate almost as an infomercial to encourage people to court infection .
“ I got better very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And now they say I ’ m immune.
” ( One of his key pandemic advisers , Scott Atlas , has reportedly pushed what amounts to a pursuit of natural herd immunity , at the likely cost of hundreds of thousands of lives . )
Trump claimed that “ ninety-nine per cent ” of Americans would likewise survive the virus , as if vulnerable Americans were a rounding error , and covid-19 didn ’ t have long-term effects on many survivors .
Some of Biden ’ s best moments came in confronting Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as when , speaking about the sites of recent spikes , the former Vice-President said , “ They ’ re the red states , they ’ re the states in the Midwest , they ’ re the states in the upper Midwest .
.
.
.
But they ’ re all Americans.
” In response , Trump mocked New York ’ s high death toll .
New York City , by the way , Trump informed the audience , is “ a ghost town.
” Drawing another dire picture , he told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what ’ s happening with your friend in Michigan , where her husband ’ s the only one allowed to do anything .
It ’ s been like a prison.
” Trump was referring to the state ’ s Democratic governor , Gretchen Whitmer , who , according to the F.B.I.
, was recently the target of a kidnapping plot hatched by members of a militia group—a development that has occasioned no self-reflection on Trump ’ s part about his personal attacks or his failure to denounce far-right extremists .
And although Whitmer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her when trying to get a boat company to expedite some work , he is not the only one allowed to do anything in Michigan .
The penal colony on the Great Lakes , like the zombie metropolis on the Hudson , is a place that exists only in Trump ’ s imagination .
The brittleness that pervades America ’ s political culture comes , in part , from four years of Trump responding to every problem by deriding someone else .
One of his main targets on Thursday was Biden ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ukraine and China ; in recent days , Trump has seized on unverified e-mails that his lawyer Rudy Giuliani says fell into his hands .
( Whatever else the e-mails are , they are not , as Trump maintains , a “ smoking gun ” that shows wrongdoing by the elder Biden . )
The resulting exchange was dizzying , despite Biden ’ s ripostes about the President ’ s own dodgy finances .
In addition to microphone muting , the debate might have benefitted from subtitles ; Trump increasingly speaks in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” “ another Russia , Russia , Russia hoax , ” “ the laptop from hell ” —that are hard to decipher .
A plain translation is that Trump is attacking Biden , his family , and any Democrat he sees because he is behind in the polls and is getting desperate .
That same impulse underlies his frenetic prophecies of American doom .
During the debate , Trump said of Biden , “ If he ’ s elected , the stock market will crash !
” But the polls don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Wall Street apparently doesn ’ t think that America will disappear .
Indeed , if Biden wins , some of the country ’ s values may reëmerge .
And Trump is the one who will be gone .
♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
The America that Donald Trump described in his debate with Joe Biden last Thursday night is a strangely destructible place—one that might, in a blink, disappear. In an exchange about covid-19, Trump said, “We can’t close up our nation, or you’re not going to have a nation.” After a few minutes, he repeated that warning, saying, “We have to open our country—we’re not going to have a country.” This is not a new move for Trump: the list of things without which, he has previously said, Americans won’t have a country includes a border wall, steel, petroleum, eminent domain, and his reëlection. Later in the debate, he noted that, if a President Biden secured a public option for health care, “this whole country will come down.”
Whether Trump wins or loses on November 3rd, Thursday night was almost certainly the last time that he will appear on a debate stage. He used the occasion to present a bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America, with triumphs invented and disasters ignored. As always, he added a dose of conspiracy theories—“All of the e-mails, the e-mails, the horrible e-mails!”—in an attempt to leave people perplexed about the truth. In contrast with the first Presidential debate, he more or less obeyed the time limits (enforced by microphone muting) and didn’t try to shout down Biden or the moderator, Kristen Welker, which mainly showed that he can prevaricate calmly. One of his bigger lies was that many of America’s greatest common problems are due to what he called “badly run, high-crime, Democrat—all run by Democrat—cities and states.”
Biden’s challenge, which he navigated fairly well, was that Trump lies in a manner that is so unanchored to reality that it becomes disorienting. Never mind, for example, that the Trump Administration’s lawyers are heading to the Supreme Court in two weeks to argue that the entire Affordable Care Act, including its protections for people with preëxisting conditions, should be thrown out, and that Trump has articulated no plan for what would replace it. When asked what he would do, he replied, simply, that “preëxisting conditions will always stay.” As for the more than five hundred children taken from their families at the border whose parents the government now can’t find, he said that their plight was the fault of “coyotes,” “cartels,” and “gangs.” On the subject of race, he repeated that he had done more for Black Americans than anybody with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln.
Trump’s falsehoods are always harmful, but distinctly so when it comes to the pandemic. The coronavirus, as it is often said, does not respect party or state lines, and because it is so highly infectious confronting it requires a unified community effort. Cases are rising in a majority of states; the official toll of dead Americans is approaching a quarter of a million, and will perhaps reach four hundred thousand by the end of the year—numbers that Biden said should, by themselves, disqualify Trump for the Presidency. Welker noted that the pandemic is entering “a dangerous new phase.” Not in Trump’s view. He insisted that any spikes will soon dissipate—“It’s going away”—and added that anyone who has doubts about his timeline for distributing a vaccine by the end of the year just doesn’t share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done.
The President used the debate almost as an infomercial to encourage people to court infection. “I got better very fast,” he said. “And now they say I’m immune.” (One of his key pandemic advisers, Scott Atlas, has reportedly pushed what amounts to a pursuit of natural herd immunity, at the likely cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.) Trump claimed that “ninety-nine per cent” of Americans would likewise survive the virus, as if vulnerable Americans were a rounding error, and covid-19 didn’t have long-term effects on many survivors. Some of Biden’s best moments came in confronting Trump’s attempts to divide and marginalize, as when, speaking about the sites of recent spikes, the former Vice-President said, “They’re the red states, they’re the states in the Midwest, they’re the states in the upper Midwest. . . . But they’re all Americans.” In response, Trump mocked New York’s high death toll.
New York City, by the way, Trump informed the audience, is “a ghost town.” Drawing another dire picture, he told Biden, “Take a look at what’s happening with your friend in Michigan, where her husband’s the only one allowed to do anything. It’s been like a prison.” Trump was referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who, according to the F.B.I., was recently the target of a kidnapping plot hatched by members of a militia group—a development that has occasioned no self-reflection on Trump’s part about his personal attacks or his failure to denounce far-right extremists. And although Whitmer’s husband was criticized for mentioning her when trying to get a boat company to expedite some work, he is not the only one allowed to do anything in Michigan. The penal colony on the Great Lakes, like the zombie metropolis on the Hudson, is a place that exists only in Trump’s imagination.
The brittleness that pervades America’s political culture comes, in part, from four years of Trump responding to every problem by deriding someone else. One of his main targets on Thursday was Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings in Ukraine and China; in recent days, Trump has seized on unverified e-mails that his lawyer Rudy Giuliani says fell into his hands. (Whatever else the e-mails are, they are not, as Trump maintains, a “smoking gun” that shows wrongdoing by the elder Biden.) The resulting exchange was dizzying, despite Biden’s ripostes about the President’s own dodgy finances. In addition to microphone muting, the debate might have benefitted from subtitles; Trump increasingly speaks in a patois of catchphrases—“eighteen angry Democrats,” “another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” “the laptop from hell”—that are hard to decipher.
A plain translation is that Trump is attacking Biden, his family, and any Democrat he sees because he is behind in the polls and is getting desperate. That same impulse underlies his frenetic prophecies of American doom. During the debate, Trump said of Biden, “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash!” But the polls don’t seem to have sparked any fall; Wall Street apparently doesn’t think that America will disappear. Indeed, if Biden wins, some of the country’s values may reëmerge. And Trump is the one who will be gone. ♦
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-10-25--Will Steve Cohen, a Symbol of Wall Street Malfeasance, Own the New York Mets?

This past Tuesday , Steven A. Cohen , the head of Point72 Asset Management , cleared an important obstacle in his campaign to buy the New York Mets , winning approval of Major League Baseball ’ s Ownership Committee .
Fred Wilpon and his brother-in-law Saul Katz , the team ’ s current owners , had accepted Cohen ’ s offer of approximately $ 2.4 billion on September 14th , after an auction process .
Cohen triumphed over two other investor groups , one led by the former Yankees player Alex Rodriguez and his partner , the actress and pop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Josh Harris and David Blitzer , experienced professional sports investors from the private-equity firms Apollo Global Management and Blackstone , respectively .
In order for the deal to go forward , Cohen must not only demonstrate that he has the funds but also navigate a series of tests meant to assess his fitness as a potential member of the small club of ( mostly ) wealthy men who own major-league baseball teams .
The ownership committee consists of eight team owners , seven of whom voted to approve Cohen .
The approval process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ executive council .
If the council signs off , the transaction goes to a full vote by all thirty teams in the league , which is currently scheduled for November 17th .
Twenty-two of the twenty-nine other team owners must also vote yes for the deal to close .
Until this week , winning their approval seemed like the biggest hurdle Cohen faced .
But a small , nearly overlooked fact just emerged that has the potential to complicate Cohen ’ s plans .
Citi Field , the stadium in Flushing Meadows , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home games , sits on park land owned by New York City , which leases the land to the owners of the Mets .
The lease contains a provision that gives the city the right to reject any new owner who fits the definition of a “ prohibited person.
” The agreement defines such a person as anyone who has been “ convicted in a criminal proceeding for a felony or any crime involving moral turpitude or that is an organized crime figure , ” or anyone who directly or indirectly controls “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a criminal proceeding.
” Cohen himself has never been convicted in a criminal proceeding , but his former hedge-fund firm , S.A.C .
Capital Advisors , pleaded guilty in 2013 to securities fraud , and one of Cohen ’ s former employees , Mathew Martoma , was convicted of insider trading , in 2014 .
Early on , the provision might have seemed too obscure to pose a problem to Cohen , the Wilpons , or to Major League Baseball , but the Times recently reported that Mayor Bill de Blasio , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s bid , notified the league that it would be investigating whether Cohen is eligible to buy the team .
It is unclear whether the Mayor ’ s office will stop the deal , but it seems certain that the city could slow it down if it wanted to .
When I contacted the mayor ’ s office , de Blasio ’ s spokesperson , Bill Neidhardt said , “ The Mayor has an obligation to the people of New York City to closely examine new leases on culturally important and incredibly valuable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my book , “ Black Edge : Inside Information , Dirty Money and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street , ” Cohen and S.A.C .
Capital were , for several years , at the center of one of the most high-profile financial-fraud investigations ever conducted , which resulted in the indictment of the company .
Cohen was never charged personally , but his firm paid $ 1.8 billion in forfeitures and penalties , and Cohen was required to shut it down .
He also was barred from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2018 .
Martoma , a former S.A.C .
portfolio manager , was sentenced to nine years in prison for insider trading at S.A.C.
, in what was billed as one of the largest cases of its kind .
In the indictment of S.A.C.
, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York , Preet Bharara , was sweeping in his condemnation of the company : in the course of more than a decade , the indictment alleged , numerous employees engaged in insider-trading offenses involving more than twenty publicly traded companies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars in ill-gotten profits for the fund .
Cohen micromanaged the company ’ s operations , and , in the years he supervised , it became “ a veritable magnet for market cheaters.
” ( Cohen declined to comment for this article . )
After the company pleaded guilty to the charges and the penalties were paid , Cohen became a symbol of Wall Street malfeasance .
Since then , he has tried to rebuild his reputation by taking steps to show that he could run his new fund , Point72 , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has gradually returned to the public sphere , speaking in 2016 at an annual conference hosted by Michael Milken , a financier who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and has since devoted his time to funding cancer research and other philanthropic endeavors .
( He was pardoned in February by President Trump . )
More recently , Point72 has been accused of gender discrimination and of creating a hostile work environment by several women ; a senior portfolio manager who recently left the company and a woman who works in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities during the last seven months .
( Cohen and Point72 declined to comment on the grievances . )
It has also emerged that the company settled with a third woman , Lauren Bonner , who filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against Point72 in 2018 , on September 17th of this year , in the final days of the Mets negotiations .
( The company has said that there were “ no adverse findings ” against Cohen or the firm . )
If he is approved , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most controversial figures to ever own a major-league baseball team , he would be one of the only owners whose methods of amassing his fortune have come under such intense legal scrutiny .
“ It just seems so messed up , ” Jeanne Christensen , a partner at the Wigdor law firm who represents Bonner and one of the other women who filed a grievance against Point72 , said , regarding the insider-trading allegations .
“ You have little kids all across the country and parents who spend all their extra money @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get a scholarship to college , to play baseball , so that maybe he can make it to a minor-league team .
It ’ s , like , the dream .
And you ’ re doing that only to answer to some guy like Cohen ?
” Though almost every buyer in the past has been approved , the league does not want anyone joining its ranks who might create a major scandal .
In 2011 , for example , Jim Crane , the former owner of Eagle Global Logistics , was applying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Houston Astros .
Questions were raised about the fact that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had recently investigated his company for race and sex discrimination in 2000 , when he still controlled it .
( Eagle settled the charges for nine million dollars . )
Two of Crane ’ s employees had also been charged , respectively , with fraud and bribery by the Justice Department .
( The two employees pleaded guilty , though Crane was not accused of wrongdoing in either case . )
Crane was still approved in the end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Major League Baseball have expressed little concern about Cohen ’ s history .
Robert Manfred , the commissioner , has indicated that he would like the purchase to move forward as swiftly and smoothly as possible .
But that speed might have precluded a more thorough background check ; Christensen noted that no one has reached out to her as part of the process .
( The league did not reply to a request for comment on that point . )
“ Let ’ s say , hypothetically , I told them everything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ So what , it doesn ’ t matter , he can still own this baseball team , they get sued all the time , ’ ” Christensen told me .
That would be dispiriting in its own way to her , she said , but “ you ’ d think they ’ d at least ask.
” The Wilpons have had their own financial woes .
In 2008 , after Bernie Madoff ’ s Ponzi scheme was exposed , it was revealed that the Wilpon family had been investors in Madoff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ settlement required that Wilpon and Katz pay a hundred and sixty million dollars in restitution to other Madoff investors who lost money .
( The amount was eventually reduced to sixty-two million dollars . )
Three years before the Madoff settlement , Wilpon and Katz agreed to repay thirteen million dollars in profits they made from an investment in another Ponzi scheme , run by Samuel Israel III .
Both of these contributed to the sense that the family is inept when it comes to managing money , and that it might sell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sports columnists spent years complaining that Wilpon and his son Jeff , who is the team ’ s chief operating officer , weren ’ t willing or able to invest sufficiently in the team .
Cohen , who is estimated to be worth as much as fourteen billion dollars , would be the richest team owner in the league .
Columnists have celebrated the prospect of someone with nearly unlimited resources owning the Mets .
One at the New York Post called Cohen “ the most popular billionaire in New York City ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s “ attitude ” and determination to win .
Cohen ’ s bid for the Mets comes after a long campaign to own a major sports franchise .
In 2012 , as federal prosecutors were preparing to file a case against S.A.C .
and Cohen was under intense scrutiny in the press , he purchased a four-per-cent stake in the Mets during an ultimately unsuccessful bid to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers .
( In 2011 , Cohen lost out on the chance to buy a larger minority interest in the Mets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Einhorn , a deal that later collapsed . )
Then , in late 2019 , Cohen entered talks to buy an eighty-per-cent stake in the team for $ 2.6 billion .
That deal fell apart , too , and the press later reported that the Wilpons had demanded that Fred and Jeff remain in their management roles with the team for five years after Cohen acquired it , which sabotaged the transaction .
( A person close to the Wilpons denied that this was why the two sides didn ’ t come to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very disappointed we couldn ’ t work out a deal , ” Cohen said in a statement at the time .
“ I gave it my best shot.
” This time around , Cohen appears to have learned from his previous experiences , and was more deferential to the Wilpons .
The other , strongest , offer for the Mets came from the consortium led by Rodriguez and Lopez , which bid a similar amount to Cohen .
They are devastated to have lost the team .
Rodriguez has his own reputational challenges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ using performance-enhancing drugs and retired from baseball in 2016 under a cloud .
But the prospect of having Lopez involved in running the team had the potential to draw more women to the sport , and seemed likely to bring more Hollywood glamour to the franchise .
Unlike Cohen , who could , if he chose , likely buy the Mets outright , Rodriguez and Lopez needed investors , and had recruited several , including Marc Lore , the president and C.E.O .
of Walmart eCommerce ; Mike Repole , the co-founder of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the owner of the Florida Panthers hockey team .
One close observer of the deal said that the group made a tactical mistake by not making Lopez a more prominent member of the team and promoting her as the one who would be making the decisions , which would have made her the first major-league team owner who is a Latinx woman .
It remains unclear why Cohen ’ s bid was chosen over theirs—the auction process is conducted confidentially—but one imagines that he applied his usual ruthless savvy in winning the contest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he ’ s always just above the fray , ” Christensen said .
“ He ’ s always three steps ahead .
He really is .
I give him that credit .
”

This past Tuesday, Steven A. Cohen, the head of Point72 Asset Management, cleared an important obstacle in his campaign to buy the New York Mets, winning the approval of Major League Baseball’s Ownership Committee. Fred Wilpon and his brother-in-law Saul Katz, the team’s current owners, had accepted Cohen’s offer of approximately $2.4 billion on September 14th, after an auction process. Cohen triumphed over two other investor groups, one led by the former Yankees player Alex Rodriguez and his partner, the actress and pop star Jennifer Lopez, and another by Josh Harris and David Blitzer, experienced professional-sports investors from the private-equity firms Apollo Global Management and Blackstone, respectively. In order for the deal to go forward, Cohen must not only demonstrate that he has the funds but also navigate a series of tests meant to assess his fitness as a potential member of the small club of (mostly) wealthy men who own major-league baseball teams. The ownership committee consists of eight team owners, seven of whom voted to approve Cohen. The approval process moves next to the league’s executive council. If the council signs off, the transaction goes to a full vote by all thirty teams in the league, which is currently scheduled for November 17th. Twenty-two of the twenty-nine other team owners must also vote yes for the deal to close. Until this week, winning their approval seemed like the biggest hurdle Cohen faced. But a small, nearly overlooked fact just emerged that has the potential to complicate Cohen’s plans.
Citi Field, the stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where the Mets play their home games, sits on park land owned by New York City, which leases the land to the owners of the Mets. The lease contains a provision that gives the city the right to reject any new owner who fits the definition of a “prohibited person.” The agreement defines such a person as anyone who has been “convicted in a criminal proceeding for a felony or any crime involving moral turpitude or that is an organized crime figure,” or anyone who directly or indirectly controls “a Person that has been convicted in a criminal proceeding.” Cohen himself has never been convicted in a criminal proceeding, but his former hedge-fund firm, S.A.C. Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty in 2013 to securities fraud, and one of Cohen’s former employees, Mathew Martoma, was convicted of insider trading, in 2014. Early on, the provision might have seemed too obscure to pose a problem to Cohen, the Wilpons, or Major League Baseball, but the Times recently reported that Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has openly backed Rodriguez and Lopez’s bid, notified the league that it would be investigating whether Cohen is eligible to buy the team. It is unclear whether the Mayor’s office will stop the deal, but it seems certain that the city could slow it down if it wanted to. When I contacted the mayor’s office, de Blasio’s spokesperson, Bill Neidhardt said, “The Mayor has an obligation to the people of New York City to closely examine new leases on culturally important and incredibly valuable city-owned land.”
As I documented in my book, “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street,” Cohen and S.A.C. Capital were, for several years, at the center of one of the most high-profile financial-fraud investigations ever conducted, which resulted in the indictment of the company. Cohen was never charged personally, but his firm paid $1.8 billion in forfeitures and penalties, and Cohen was required to shut it down. He also was barred from managing outside investor money until January, 2018. Martoma, a former S.A.C. portfolio manager, was sentenced to nine years in prison for insider trading at S.A.C., in what was billed as one of the largest cases of its kind. In the indictment of S.A.C., the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, was sweeping in his condemnation of the company: in the course of more than a decade, the indictment alleged, numerous employees engaged in insider-trading offenses involving more than twenty publicly traded companies, which generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten profits for the fund. Cohen micromanaged the company’s operations, and, in the years he supervised, it became “a veritable magnet for market cheaters.” (Cohen declined to comment for this article.)
After the company pleaded guilty to the charges and the penalties were paid, Cohen became a symbol of Wall Street malfeasance. Since then, he has tried to rebuild his reputation by taking steps to show that he could run his new fund, Point72, while adhering strictly to securities rules. He has gradually returned to the public sphere, speaking in 2016 at an annual conference hosted by Michael Milken, a financier who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and has since devoted his time to funding cancer research and other philanthropic endeavors. (He was pardoned, in February, by President Trump.) More recently, Point72 has been accused of gender discrimination and of creating a hostile work environment by several women; a senior portfolio manager who recently left the company and a woman who works in the investor-relations department both filed grievances with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities during the past seven months. (Cohen and Point72 declined to comment on the grievances.) It has also emerged that the company settled with a third woman, Lauren Bonner, who filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against Point72 in 2018, on September 17th of this year, in the final days of the Mets negotiations. (The company has said that there were “no adverse findings” against Cohen or the firm.) If he is approved, Cohen would not only be one of the most controversial figures ever to own a major-league baseball team, he would be one of the only owners whose methods of amassing his fortune have come under such intense legal scrutiny.
“It just seems so messed up,” Jeanne Christensen, a partner at the Wigdor law firm who represents Bonner and one of the other women who filed a grievance against Point72, said, regarding the insider-trading allegations. “You have little kids all across the country and parents who spend all their extra money on little Johnny so he might possibly get a scholarship to college, to play baseball, so that maybe he can make it to a minor-league team. It’s, like, the dream. And you’re doing that only to answer to some guy like Cohen?”
Though almost every buyer in the past has been approved, the league does not want anyone joining its ranks who might create a major scandal. In 2011, for example, Jim Crane, the former owner of Eagle Global Logistics, was applying for the second time to buy the Houston Astros. Questions were raised about the fact that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had recently investigated his company for race and sex discrimination in 2000, when he still controlled it. (Eagle settled the charges for nine million dollars.) Two of Crane’s employees had also been charged, respectively, with fraud and bribery by the Justice Department. (The two employees pleaded guilty, though Crane was not accused of wrongdoing in either case.) Crane was still approved in the end.
So far, the leaders of Major League Baseball have expressed little concern about Cohen’s history. Robert Manfred, the commissioner, has indicated that he would like the purchase to move forward as swiftly and smoothly as possible. But that speed might have precluded a more thorough background check; Christensen noted that no one has reached out to her as part of the process. (The league did not reply to a request for comment on that point.) “Let’s say, hypothetically, I told them everything about the case, and they said, ‘So what? It doesn’t matter; he can still own this baseball team. They get sued all the time,’ ” Christensen told me. That would be dispiriting in its own way to her, she said, but “you’d think they’d at least ask.”
The Wilpons have had their own financial woes. In 2008, after Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was exposed, it was revealed that the Wilpon family had been investors in Madoff’s fund; a subsequent lawsuit settlement required that Wilpon and Katz pay a hundred and sixty million dollars in restitution to other Madoff investors who lost money. (The amount was eventually reduced to sixty-two million dollars.) Three years before the Madoff settlement, Wilpon and Katz agreed to repay thirteen million dollars in profits they made from an investment in another Ponzi scheme, run by Samuel Israel III. Both of these contributed to the sense that the family is inept when it comes to managing money, and that it might sell the team owing to financial distress. Sports columnists spent years complaining that Wilpon and his son Jeff, who is the team’s chief operating officer, weren’t willing or able to invest sufficiently in the team. Cohen, who is estimated to be worth as much as fourteen billion dollars, would be the richest team owner in the league. Columnists have celebrated the prospect of someone with nearly unlimited resources owning the Mets. One at the New York Post called Cohen “the most popular billionaire in New York City” and said that Mets fans appreciated Cohen’s “attitude” and determination to win.
Cohen’s bid for the Mets comes after a long campaign to own a major sports franchise. In 2012, as federal prosecutors were preparing to file a case against S.A.C. and Cohen was under intense scrutiny in the press, he purchased a four-per-cent stake in the Mets during an ultimately unsuccessful bid to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. (In 2011, Cohen lost out on the chance to buy a larger minority interest in the Mets to a different hedge-fund billionaire, David Einhorn, a deal that later collapsed.) Then, in late 2019, Cohen entered talks to buy an eighty-per-cent stake in the team for $2.6 billion. That deal fell apart, too, and the press later reported that the Wilpons had demanded that Fred and Jeff remain in their management roles with the team for five years after Cohen acquired it, which sabotaged the transaction. (A person close to the Wilpons denied that this was why the two sides didn’t come to terms.) “I’m very disappointed we couldn’t work out a deal,” Cohen said in a statement at the time. “I gave it my best shot.” This time around, Cohen appears to have learned from his previous experiences, and was more deferential to the Wilpons.


newyorker--2020-10-25--Sunday Reading: Eerie Storytelling

Sunday Reading: Eerie Storytelling

As Halloween approaches , we ’ re bringing you a selection of pieces on visionaries of horror .
In “ Kid Goth , ” Dana Goodyear explores the dark fantasy tales of the writer Neil Gaiman .
In “ The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson , ” Zoë Heller writes about the complicated life of the novelist .
In “ Show the Monster , ” Daniel Zalewski considers the wondrous and astonishing creations of the film director Guillermo del Toro .
In “ The Strange and Twisted Life of ‘ Frankenstein , ’ ” Jill Lepore examines how Mary Shelley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Finally , in “ What Are You Afraid Of ?
, ” Mark Singer profiles the master of horror himself , Stephen King .
So turn off cable news .
Click out of all those polling Web sites .
Open up a bag of candy corn .
And read some terrifying stories that you can actually enjoy .
A new biography explores one of the twentieth century ’ s most tortured writers .
After two hundred years , are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley ’ s novel ?
Terror @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but it ’ s not the only reason he ’ s so popular—and so frightening .

As Halloween approaches, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces on visionaries of horror. In “Kid Goth,” Dana Goodyear explores the dark fantasy tales of the writer Neil Gaiman. In “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson,” Zoë Heller writes about the complicated life of the novelist. In “Show the Monster,” Daniel Zalewski considers the wondrous and astonishing creations of the film director Guillermo del Toro. In “The Strange and Twisted Life of ‘Frankenstein,’ ” Jill Lepore examines how Mary Shelley came up with her classic monster tale. Finally, in “What Are You Afraid Of?,” Mark Singer profiles the master of horror himself, Stephen King. So turn off cable news. Click out of all those polling Web sites. Open up a bag of candy corn. And read some terrifying stories that you can actually enjoy.
— David Remnick
Photograph by Eric Ogden
Neil Gaiman’s fantasies.
A new biography explores one of the twentieth century’s most tortured writers.
Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen.
Illustration by Henning Wagenbreth
After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley’s novel?
Photograph by Duane Michals / Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York
Terror is Stephen King’s medium, but it’s not the only reason he’s so popular—and so frightening.


newyorker--2020-10-25--The Cryptic Crossword: No. 26

The Cryptic Crossword: No. 26

Some clues have been edited for clarity .
Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle ’ s answers in @ @ @

Some clues have been edited for clarity. Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle’s answers in our archive.


newyorker--2020-10-25--In the Streets with Antifa

In the Streets with Antifa

Antifascist doctrine does not allow for avoiding such confrontations : “ They will not pass ” is another precept , deriving from the Spanish Civil War .
But , in the summer of 2018 , several activists in Portland created a new organization—PopMob , short for Popular Mobilization—which aimed to enlist a more diverse , and less militant , league of protesters to counter Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys .
Whereas Rose City Antifa has strict vetting protocols for new members , Effie Baum , a co-founder of PopMob , told me , “ Everybody is welcome under our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ PopMob promotes what Baum calls “ everyday antifascism , ” not as an alternative but as a complement to front-line combatants in black bloc .
“ If you ’ re gon na punch a Nazi , punch a Nazi , ” Baum said .
“ If you ’ re gon na stand in the back with a sign that says ‘ Love Trumps Hate , ’ there ’ s room for both of us.
” It was dark when I arrived downtown .
As I parked on a wide avenue in the shopping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sprinted by .
Turning a corner , I came upon a small crowd facing a police cordon .
Behind the officers , a dead body lay in a pool of light .
The victim was Aaron Danielson , a thirty-nine-year-old supporter of Patriot Prayer .
He ’ d been shot by Michael Reinoehl , a forty-eight-year-old white man who—though unaffiliated with Rose City Antifa or PopMob—once wrote on Instagram , “ I am 100 % ANTIFA all the way !
” Reinoehl later claimed that he had fired in self-defense , and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ truncheon were found on Danielson .
At the time , however , nobody in the crowd knew what had happened or who was involved .
“ What are you doing here ?
” I heard someone say .
A man in black bloc , his face concealed behind a balaclava and ski goggles , was addressing a man with a trimmed beard , wraparound sunglasses , and a baseball hat emblazoned with the name Loren Culp—the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Washington .
He also wore a hooded sweatshirt that said “ Patriot Prayer.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Danielson had driven into Portland in the same truck .
After following the pro-Trump caravan back to the shopping mall , they received messages about the skirmishes downtown , and , separately , they returned to the city .
Gibson had happened on the crime scene accidentally , and he had no idea that the corpse thirty feet away was Danielson ’ s .
Another man in black bloc told Gibson that he ’ d heard the victim had been murdered by a Proud Boy .
This seemed to be the crowd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Antifa nor the Proud Boys had killed anybody before .
Affecting a casual posture , Gibson waved dismissively and said , “ That ’ s what they always be yelling and screaming about— ‘ Some white supremacist killed someone tonight.
’ They say that shit all the time.
” “ Because you bring white supremacists to town all the time , ” someone said .
“ I ’ m brown , ” Gibson responded .
He rolled up his sleeve and showed his skin tone .
People pressed around Gibson , shouting at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Why don ’ t you guys stop acting like Nazis ?
, ” a man in a Young Turks sweatshirt spit in his face .
“ Can we stop with the hate ?
” Gibson said , making no move to wipe off the saliva .
Protesters continued to arrive , and , as the volume and ferocity of their insults escalated , Gibson turned to a blond woman who ’ d been standing at his side and said , “ Let ’ s go.
” A mob of at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kept up a show of equanimity until his hat and glasses were snatched away .
Soon , drinks were emptied on him , objects were hurled at him , eggs were smashed on him , and he was punched and pepper-sprayed .
With the blond woman ’ s help , he stumbled forward while someone rang a cowbell in his ears and others strobed flashlights in his eyes .
The mob grew .
As far as I could tell , all of Gibson ’ s assailants were white .
At some point , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and escorted him down the street , keeping at bay the most belligerent aggressors .
A short Asian man in a bicycle helmet yelled , “ Let him leave , goddammit !
Everyone back the fuck off !
” After several blocks , Gibson and the woman ducked into a gas station , and an employee locked the door behind them .
The man in the bicycle helmet blocked the entrance , but people smashed the windows and kicked open a side door .
Another protester raised his gas mask and pleaded , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but are you going to lynch him ?
” The police arrived , and the protesters fled .
Gibson vomited in the bathroom , washed the pepper spray from his eyes , and called a friend to pick him up .
A reporter looking to identify the shooting victim texted Gibson a photograph of medics treating Danielson .
“ I recognized him right away , ” he said .
After the crowd dispersed , I found the man in the bicycle helmet at a nearby 7-Eleven .
His name was Rico De @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Filipino-American who studied engineering at Portland Community College .
Earlier that day , a Trump supporter had shot him in the face with a paintball gun ; the flesh around his left eye was stained neon pink .
De Vera had been regularly participating in Black Lives Matter protests since May .
Although he remained enthusiastic about the movement , he worried that in Portland it had been subsumed by the city ’ s militant antifascist culture , which he saw as violent and white .
“ It pisses me off , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to use tonight to say that Black Lives Matter is a bunch of thugs.
” We walked a few blocks to a park outside the Multnomah County Justice Center , where people had congregated by a perimeter of concrete barriers and metal fencing .
This was where most of the Patriot Prayer rallies and Antifa counter-protests had taken place ; more recently , it had become a locus for Black Lives Matter demonstrations .
In June , huge crowds had lobbed fireworks , bottles , and other projectiles at the Justice Center , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police headquarters and the county jail .
On June 26th , Trump called for the deployment of federal agents to protect government property throughout the country from “ left-wing extremists.
” The Justice Center stands beside a U.S. District courthouse , and in July more than a hundred employees of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S .
Marshals Service arrived in Portland , ostensibly to protect the federal building .
A U.S. marshal shot a twenty-six-year-old protester in the head with an impact munition , fracturing his skull ; the protester @ @ @ @ @ @ @ box with both hands .
Such excessive force drew larger and larger crowds to the courthouse until Chad Wolf , the acting Secretary of Homeland Security , began to relinquish responsibility to the Oregon State Police , in late July .
Now a young woman with a megaphone told the people at the Justice Center that she had an announcement .
“ I just got word that the person who died was a Patriot Prayer person , ” she said .
“ He was a fucking Nazi .
Our community held its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
.
I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.
” Portland , whose population is six per cent Black , is the whitest big city in America .
The historian Walidah Imarisha traces the origin of these demographics to the founding of Oregon , which settlers envisaged as a “ white utopia.
” When Oregon joined the union , in 1859 , it became the only state with an outright ban on Black people .
Later , redlining policies and urban-renewal projects displaced many African-Americans , a process reprised by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland are resolutely non-hierarchical ; as a rule , however , white protesters defer to their Black and brown peers , who are usually the only people to use megaphones , deliver speeches , and lead marches .
Since the federal withdrawal from the Justice Center , the protests have targeted the Portland police with nightly “ direct actions.
” Every day , a message circulates on social media announcing a rendezvous point ( usually a park ) ; from there , protesters depart to a nearby destination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A diffuse , anonymous network , communicating on encrypted messaging apps , chooses these locations .
Although Fox News and the Trump Administration characterize Portland as an apocalyptic war zone , some direct actions attract fewer than a hundred people , and even on well-attended nights their impact is undetectable beyond a few square blocks .
Still , property destruction does occur , and , because the vast majority of protesters are white , this has been a source of tension with some residents of color .
In June , after rioting damaged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Boulevard , in a traditionally African-American neighborhood in North Portland , a consortium of Black community leaders held a press conference to condemn the vandalism .
J. W. Matt Hennessee , the pastor of Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church , told white protesters , “ Get your knee off our neck .
That is what you are doing when you do stuff like this.
” Ron Herndon , who led civil-rights campaigns in Portland during the eighties , called the vandals “ demented ” and said , “ Go back to whatever hole @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helping us.
” On the weekend of Columbus Day , which Portland recognizes as Indigenous Peoples Day , protesters toppled a statue of Abraham Lincoln , shot through the windows of a restaurant owned by a Black veteran , and broke into the Oregon Historical Society , where they inexplicably stole a celebrated quilt commemorating African-American heritage , stitched by fifteen Black women in the nineteen-seventies .
( Police found the quilt lying in the rain a few blocks away , slightly damaged . )
The leaders of thirty Native American groups released @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the brutish ways of our colonizers.
” Two days after Aaron Danielson was killed , I joined a few hundred protesters outside a luxury building where Ted Wheeler , Portland ’ s Democratic mayor , owns an apartment .
In Portland , the mayor serves as the commissioner of the police bureau , which protesters are determined to see defunded .
As a picnic table from a restaurant was dragged into the street and set on fire , I spotted Najee Gow , a twenty-three-year-old Black nurse , leading chants of “ Fuck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ met Gow the previous week , when several young women had staged a sit-in in Wheeler ’ s lobby .
Gow , who wore a peacoat over a red-white-and-blue tank top , had been incensed that no African-Americans were included in the demonstration .
“ It ’ s what they ’ ve always done , ” he ’ d said .
“ Hijack Black people ’ s movements .
This is disgusting .
”

For antifascists, the Reinoehl case is an example of state-sanctioned murder, and the Rittenhouse case shows how extrajudicial killing can be outsourced to civilians. Morgan, the Rose City Antifa member, said, “That’s what to me is uniquely terrifying about this moment. It feels like these far-right groups have basically been given the go-ahead to step in and commit this extralegal violence where the police cannot, but want to.”
Some leftists compare the President’s demonization of dissent to the anti-Communist fervor of the mid-twentieth century. Certainly, the right-wing culture of paranoia that he tirelessly fosters can look like mass delusion. In an August interview with Fox News, Trump spoke of an airplane “almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that,” which he linked to “people that are in the dark shadows” who “control” Joe Biden. The baseless claim echoed the baroque anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the cult group QAnon, which has gained surprising traction among Republicans, in part thanks to Trump’s tacit approval of it. A week after the President’s plane remarks, wildfires rampaged across Oregon, forcing more than forty thousand people to evacuate and killing nine. Smoke filled Portland’s skies, and activists suspended demonstrations, turning to relief efforts. While some protesters set up a donation point outside a shopping mall, and others delivered supplies to rural shelters, QAnon promoted a false rumor that antifascists had started the fires.
Across Oregon, 911 calls inquiring about Antifa arsonists flooded dispatch services, and checkpoints manned by armed citizens slowed evacuation efforts. During a public Zoom conference, a captain in the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office related accounts of “suspected Antifa” members felling telephone poles “in the hopes of starting further fires.” The sheriff soon repudiated these reports, but not before a Clackamas County deputy was captured on video telling a local resident, “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell.” In a separate video, the deputy warned people that if they killed miscreants they could be charged with murder; however, he advised, if “you throw a fucking knife in their hand after you shoot them, that’s on you.” (The deputy was placed on leave and is under investigation.) Several law-enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., beseeched citizens to stop spreading the false Antifa stories. But at a rally Trump insisted, “They have to pay a price for the damage and the horror that they’ve caused.” Some critics noted that, in 2018, Trump pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond—Oregon ranchers who had been convicted of igniting fires on federally managed land.
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One day, at the protester-run donation point, I met Gary Floyd, a longtime activist who had just returned from Mill City, an hour south of Portland. Floyd is in the process of registering an official Black Lives Matter chapter in Oregon, and he had filled his trunk with food and water, intending to help evacuees and thereby show them that the organization was nothing to be feared. Outside Mill City, he parked and opened his trunk. Although Floyd has been involved in activism since the Rodney King riots, in 1992, the hate that he encountered took him aback. “I was told to get the fuck out of town and called the N-word four or five times,” he told me. “People were passing by and yelling out their windows at me.”
After Mac Smiff, the hip-hop journalist, finished his speech at the Ventura Park rally on September 5th, an African-American woman took the stage. Protesters would be marching to the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct house, she announced. In an arch tone, she reminded the crowd, “We celebrate a diversity of tactics.”
I’d heard variations of the phrase repeatedly in Portland. The maxim was first codified by demonstrators at the 2008 Republican National Convention, in St. Paul, Minnesota: to maintain cohesion among sometimes fractious activists, they urged acceptance of all styles of protest. Effie Baum, the PopMob co-founder, told me, “One of the tools of the state is getting us to create that dichotomy between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters.’ ” Another popular chant at direct actions was “No bad protesters in a revolution.” The vandalism that I witnessed in Portland was perpetrated by a very small minority, but even fewer people attempted to intervene, and those who did were often disparaged as “peace police.” The result was that the most extreme acts generally set the tone of the demonstrations—a tangible marker of the movement’s ideological drift.
The rapid-response team blocked the road to the precinct house. Near the front of the march, I found Rico De Vera, the engineering student, live-streaming with his cell phone. As we greeted each other, a Molotov cocktail was hurled from the rear and exploded a few feet away, just shy of the officers. Flames splashed protesters, and a man’s leg caught on fire. While medics tended to him, two more Molotov cocktails exploded between us and the officers, who discharged tear gas, stun grenades, and impact munitions, scattering the march. A helicopter hovered overhead. People stumbled into side streets, coughing and retching.
I lost De Vera in the melee but caught up with him a few hours later, on a commercial boulevard. He and another man, a thirty-five-year-old African-American named Jay Knight, were arguing with a white protester in black bloc. De Vera and Knight were angry about the Molotov cocktails; the white protester defended their use.
“If you guys keep playing war games, there’s gonna be an actual war,” De Vera said. “They’re looking for a reason. No one here is prepared for what real war is like. Everyone here will be fucked, and people of color will be especially fucked.”
Knight added, “Molotov cocktails make this side look worse than the cops. It makes people who were on the fence dismiss all of this as criminality.”
The white man muttered something inaudible and walked off. Knight shook his head. “They all use the same argument—‘Oh, a Black person called for a diversity of tactics.’ ” Later, Knight told me, “This needs to stop. It’s become a mockery. When you have Trump using this to be reëlected, it’s, like, ‘O.K., guys, wake up.’ But they don’t care.”
Respect for a diversity of tactics was always intended to strengthen militant activists, not sway moderates. The liberal position that violence and vandalism are undemocratic rings hollow to radical leftists for the same reason that appeals to free speech do: from their perspective, we don’t live in a real democracy, and our speech isn’t truly free. In “Antifa,” Mark Bray points out that millions of incarcerated Americans have been silenced and disenfranchised, and that prison abolitionists want to eliminate “this black hole of rightlessness.” Anarchists, furthermore, “aim to construct a classless, post-capitalist society that would eradicate significant discrepancies in our ability to make our speech meaningful.” However fanciful this may sound, it’s what many antifascists are fighting for, which informs how they fight.
After leaving Knight and De Vera, I followed another group into a neighborhood where a man and a woman peered out from their second-story bedroom window.
“Get away from our cars!” the woman snapped.
Protesters loitered in their driveway. Insults were exchanged. “We’re Democrats, you fucking jerks!” the woman said.
The protesters laughed and moved on.
The resilience of the Portland protests is rare, and, in one veteran organizer’s view, isolated moments of ugliness hardly matter. The direct actions bring leftists together, reinforcing their solidarity. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker
That afternoon, Joey Gibson and hundreds of Patriot Prayer supporters had held a memorial service for Aaron Danielson in a Vancouver park. Speakers remembered Danielson as a “unifier” with “a huge heart”—“the first guy to buy you a drink if you were having a bad day.” I met a friend of Danielson’s there: a middle-aged man in a Patriot Prayer T-shirt, carrying a longboard and a sidearm. An online-meme creator and “info warrior,” he told me that Antifa answered to George Soros, who collaborated with China, which controlled the United Nations, which had created COVID-19 to lead Americans “lockstep into a one-world global-medical tyranny.” He said of Danielson’s death, “We’re a hornet’s nest, and we’ve been kicked. We need to be feared. A central message that we’ve portrayed over and over again is: They must respect us.”
Nonetheless, when Gibson took the stage, he implored the audience not to seek revenge: “I don’t want to see one person going to Portland and committing acts of violence.” The press had shown up, and Gibson seemed eager to cast himself and Patriot Prayer as irreproachably virtuous. He spoke passionately about resisting hate and about the importance of forgiveness. Though he didn’t mention the abuse he had endured the night that Danielson was killed, he pointedly extolled the courageous faith of Jesus, who had “walked straight into death.” Describing Patriot Prayer supporters as embattled victims in a society antagonistic to their existence, Gibson expressed a paradoxical sentiment common among heavily armed Christians: “I’m sick and tired of living a life of fear.”
Later, Rose City Antifa published a photograph, taken at the memorial, showing Gibson with his arm around Chester Doles, a former Imperial Wizard in the K.K.K. Doles went to prison in 1993 for assaulting a Black man, and was arrested again in 2016 for his involvement in a bar fight in Georgia between skinheads and an interracial couple. He recently started a pro-Trump group called American Patriots USA, which, according to Ace, the Rose City Antifa member, “appears to use Patriot Prayer as a template for organizing in Georgia with a similar base.” Ace added that white supremacists like Doles have learned “how to project an image of quote-unquote patriotism while pedalling an extremely hateful ideology.” (In an e-mail, Gibson said of the photograph, “I took pictures with over 50 people that day. I have no idea who he is.”)
After the service ended, a few dozen Proud Boys lingered on the edge of the park, most of them wearing the organization’s signature black-and-yellow Fred Perry polo shirts. (Fred Perry recently denounced the Proud Boys and discontinued production of the polos in North America.) When I approached the group, I was greeted by a man with long graying hair and a thick white goatee, who held the hand of a woman about half his height. “PROUD BOY” was tattooed on his forearm, and he wore a gun on his hip.
His name was David Machado, and he was a sixty-one-year-old Air Force veteran, a retired flight engineer, and one of the first members of the Vancouver Proud Boys. He wanted me to know that he and his wife, Carie, were children of Mexican immigrants. Machado had become involved with Patriot Prayer in 2016 because, like Gibson, he’d felt persecuted for his political and religious beliefs. “If you’re for Trump now, you’re a white supremacist,” he said, incredulous. “We have Mexican kids, Mexican families. It’s just not right.”
“My husband shouldn’t have to tell me that if he’s not with me I can’t wear my Trump gear,” Carie said.
Machado had served as Gibson’s personal security detail at Portland rallies. He’d been hospitalized twice for injuries sustained from antifascists. Activists had posted photographs of him around his neighborhood, on posters that called him a Nazi. Now he never left his house unarmed. “I’m on their hit list,” he said.
While Machado and I spoke, the other Proud Boys left and headed to a nearby bar. Machado nervously scanned the park. “I don’t wanna be out here all by myself,” he told me. It was broad daylight. A couple pushed a stroller across the grass.
But Machado’s concern later proved reasonable. At the bar, a man began filming Machado and his friends with his cell phone. “He was trying to dox us,” Machado said. After a bouncer made him leave, the man ran over a Proud Boy in the parking lot, fracturing his skull and rupturing his eardrum. The man was eventually arrested and charged with a felony hit-and-run. Although he wasn’t a member of Rose City Antifa, he had shared a social-media post advocating violence against racists.