默默新聞08

2019年6月3日星期一

On Politics With Lisa Lerer: Trump’s Day of Prayer

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June 3, 2019

Evening Edition

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.

Pool photo by Sarah Silbiger/EPA, via Shutterstock

President Trump isn’t much of a churchgoer. During his time in the White House, his church visits have largely been limited to Christmas and Easter services. When asked for his favorite Bible verse during the 2016 presidential campaign, he replied that he “didn’t want to get into specifics.” He has a habit of autographing Bibles at campaign stops.

But Sunday was different. Surprising reporters and pastors, Mr. Trump decided to pop in for a 15-minute stop at McLean Bible Church in Northern Virginia after a round of golf that afternoon. The timing was unusual — most churches conduct Sunday services in the morning — and so was his look, which consisted of golf shoes, a baseball hat and a new slicked-back hairstyle that nabbed most of the headlines.

Aides said the president made the stop to pray for the victims of the Virginia Beach shooting. But Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times’s ace national religion correspondent, alerted me to something else that was going on.

About a week ago, the evangelical leader Franklin Graham, along with several hundred Christian leaders, called for this past Sunday to be a “special day of prayer” for Mr. Trump. Vice President Mike Pence participated at Sanibel Community Church. So did the Rev. David Platt at McLean Bible Church, who said he was given barely any notice of the president’s visit — and suspected it would divide his congregation.

“Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that we didn’t see coming, and we’re faced with a decision in a moment when we don’t have the liberty of deliberation, so we do our best to glorify God,” he said in a statement on the church’s website. “Today, I found myself in one of those situations.”

The victims of the shooting, and even the shooting itself, went unmentioned during the visit.

So what do we make of Mr. Trump’s decision to find a bit of religion?

Over the past two and half years, Washington, the country and the world have had to acclimate to the unpredictable and often unpolitic style of the president. It’s clear that people who want things from the White House have learned one lesson quite well: If you want to curry favor with Mr. Trump, make it about Mr. Trump.

We saw that last week, when Japanese officials rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Trump, serving cheeseburgers and even letting him award a 70-pound, eagle-topped President’s Cup to the winner of a sumo wrestling match. We’ll most likely see it this week during his state visit to Britain, where officials are expected to lavish him with ceremony, even as Labour Party leaders boycott the visit.

And we saw it with Mr. Trump’s church visit on Sunday, which came — it’s worth noting — less than a day after the president took to Twitter to thank Mr. Graham for his effort.

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Drop us a line!

We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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Environmental rollbacks

Erin Kirkland for The New York Times

A new investigation from our Climate team found 84 environmental rules and regulations that the Trump administration was trying to eliminate. We asked one of the reporters behind the effort, Kendra Pierre-Louis, to tell us more:

When President Trump took office, he did so promising that he would cut regulations. But that’s a broad pledge — it didn’t actually make clear which rules would be changed. To gain some clarity, about a year and a half ago the Climate desk began tracking the environmental regulations that the Trump administration was undoing.

For a number of reasons, the definition of a rollback that we settled on focuses on regulatory changes. What this means, for example, is that the E.P.A.’s move to reject a ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that can lead to developmental delays in children, is on our list. The administration’s decision to halt funding for research centers that focus on the risks to children from toxic chemicals, however, is not.

Here are a few changes that stood out:

• Proposed weakening Obama-era fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks. (The proposal also challenges California’s right to set its own more stringent standards.)

• Loosened offshore drilling safety regulations put in effect by the Obama administration after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010.

• Revoked President Barack Obama’s executive order that set a goal of cutting the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over 10 years.

The list is agnostic. It makes no distinction as to whether a rollback is good or bad. But many of the rollbacks, such as the ones that eliminated limits and reporting requirements on methane releases, will delay meaningful action on climate change. And the experts say, when it comes to climate change, we’re quickly running out of time to act.

Read the full story here: 84 Environmental Rules on the Way Out Under Trump

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Gun control and tragedy

Our colleague Reid Epstein sent us this note today, on the unique circumstances of an article he recently wrote about gun control:

I’ve written about the politics of gun control since 2012, when the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School again thrust the issue into the national spotlight. But never before have I had an article about gun politics come hours before a mass shooting.

On Friday morning, The Times published my article detailing how, for the first time in a generation, Democratic presidential candidates were debating the best way to combat gun violence. And as some contenders are pushing the political discussion beyond universal background checks, grass-roots groups are calling for a more aggressive approach than is being advocated by the major gun control organizations.

On Friday afternoon, a gunman killed a dozen people at a municipal building in Virginia Beach.

The 2020 candidates immediately weighed in on Twitter, calling for action. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey used his speech at the California Democratic Party convention on Saturday afternoon to denounce “the normalization of mass murder in our country.”

“Our children, getting drills on how to hide underneath desks because children are being murdered in our schools, and we do nothing,” Mr. Booker said. “It is time for us as a nation not to normalize the violence and the carnage of gun violence.”

But by Monday, the Virginia Beach shooting had, for the most part, already faded from the news cycle.

Read Reid’s story: Gun Issues, Long at the Fringe, Now Loom Large for Democratic Candidates

And read the latest on the Virginia Beach shooting here.

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What to read tonight

• Joe Biden’s disastrous campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination offers a revealing look at the personal tics and political flaws of the front-runner in the 2020 race.

• Black and Hispanic enrollment in New York’s specialized schools has plummeted over the past 40 years. Here’s a look at how things changed.

• Why be early when you can be late? I am definitely here for the joy of running late to your flight.

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… Seriously

“Jeopardy!” is going to be interesting tonight — either a record will be broken, or a streak will end. We won’t spoil it, but you can read about what happens here.

(This prompted a big internal debate about spoilers. I think they’re unavoidable, and we all just need to deal with it. But Editor Tom hates them. And editors always win.)

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Thanks for reading. Politics is more than what goes on inside the White House. On Politics brings you the people, issues and ideas reshaping our world.

Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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Your Monday Evening Briefing

iTunes, Britain, Jeopardy

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Monday, June 3, 2019

NYTimes.com »

Your Monday Evening Briefing

By VICTORIA SHANNON AND HIROKO MASUIKE

Good evening. Here's the latest.

Tom Brenner for The New York Times

1. Investors crushed Big Tech, pushing the Nasdaq market index into correction territory.

Shares of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook all fell following reports that they are targets of heightened government scrutiny, the first two from the Justice Department and the second two from the Federal Trade Commission.

Only a hint from the Federal Reserve that interest rates might drop saved the market from a broader drop.

The new scrutiny doesn't mean official federal investigations are underway. But it's clear regulators are growing ever more uneasy with the clout of big tech companies. Some presidential candidates are making it a campaign issue.

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

2. President Trump started his state visit to Britain.

Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, had tea with the Prince of Wales and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, laid a wreath at Westminster Abbey, and sat at a formal dinner at Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth II.

But first, the president carried on an ugly dispute with the mayor of London, calling him a "stone cold loser."

Demonstrations are expected Tuesday as Mr. Trump meets with Prime Minister Theresa May. He will visit France later in the week for D-Day commemorations.

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Erin Schaff/The New York Times

3. A U.S. fiscal crisis is lurking around the corner.

Lawmakers say they need to act now, before the summer recess starts, to avert a budget disaster in the fall. Senator Mitch McConnell, pictured above in the Capitol last month, offered hope for a deal with Democrats.

Analysts say the Treasury will run out of room by October or November to borrow money to keep the government operating, potentially forcing the government to default on its debt.

That's about the time budget deals expire and strict spending caps come into force, automatically cutting military and domestic spending across the board by $125 billion.

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Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

4. The boost from tax cuts may not last.

President Trump's plans to increase tariffs on Mexico and China would wipe out the benefits of his signature tax cuts for the poorest Americans, analyses by the Tax Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania say. Above, a scene in Ciudad Juárez.

Higher earners would fare only slightly better, with their tax gains significantly eroded but not entirely washed away.

The potential for tariffs to nullify the impact shows how the trade war could undermine a prime re-election issue for Mr. Trump, a strong economy.

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Erin Schaff for The New York Times

5. John Dean, a central Watergate-era figure, is returning to Capitol Hill.

House Democrats said Mr. Dean, President Richard Nixon's White House counsel, would be their first star witness in a series of hearings focused on Robert Mueller's findings. He is pictured above testifying against Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court last year.

Scheduled for June 10 in the House Judiciary Committee, the initial hearing is not expected to be the showcase Democrats had hoped for, since Mr. Mueller himself will not be testifying, at least for now.

But it will allow lawmakers on the panel — which is traditionally charged with carrying out impeachment proceedings — to air Mr. Mueller's findings for the first time.

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

6. iTunes, the software that upended the music industry, is being retired from desktop computers, its last digital home.

Apple said separate apps for music, video and podcasts would replace iTunes on computers, just as they have already on mobile devices. It's another way for the company to drive its software and services as iPhone sales retreat.

At its software developer conference, pictured above, Apple also unveiled map and messaging improvements, smartwatch and video software upgrades, a high-end Mac Pro desktop, and new privacy and health-monitoring features.

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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

7. The motive is still unknown in Friday's mass shooting in Virginia. What is clear is that many lives were cut short.

Eleven Virginia Beach workers were killed in the rampage, along with a contractor visiting for a permit. The employees had collectively worked for the city for more than 150 years.

It was one of the deadliest episodes of workplace violence in the U.S. in recent years. The gunman, a city engineer who also died in the shooting, sent an email in the morning saying he was resigning, just hours before opening fire on his colleagues.

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A man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing's Changan Boulevard in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989.

Jeff Widener/Associated Press

8. "Tank Man" is still a mystery, 30 years later.

Decades of cyber-sleuthing have cast little light on the identity of the man captured in the image above, standing boldly in front of a convoy of Chinese tanks in Beijing after its deadly effort to clear Tiananmen Square.

The government has tried to eliminate the memory of Tank Man, censoring images of him and punishing those who have evoked him. Many younger Chinese do not recognize the iconic photo.

Some believe Tank Man was executed. Others argue he might have been saved and could be in hiding.

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Peter Horvath

9. There are fewer secrets in the age of consumer DNA testing.

Increasing numbers of parents who used anonymous artificial insemination have been discovering years later through genetic tests that the sperm they purchased is not from the donor they chose.

The legal remedies are slight, and the parents say sperm banks and fertility clinics ought to be better regulated.

"I didn't choose someone who has a history of brain cancer in the family," said one mother of two boys whose DNA results were not what anyone expected. "I would never have chosen this donor."

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Jeopardy Productions

10. "Who is James Holzhauer?"

That's the question that may get an answer for the ages on "Jeopardy" tonight. But we're not going to spoil it for you. We're not even going to show you a current image.

You can click through if you want to know the latest. (The show has already aired in some areas.)

Otherwise, we'll just say have a gracious evening.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

And don't miss Your Morning Briefing. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning.

Want to catch up on past briefings? You can browse them here.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.

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