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But this past week, Trump created whiplash. On Monday — just moments after Alexander and Murray released the blueprint for a short-term authorization of federal subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford coverage but that the administration had just halted — Trump said he supported the effort.

Corker said his fellow Tennessean has “the patience of Job” to negotiate with Trump, referring to the biblical prophet who suffers one curse after another but keeps his faith.

“The expectation that you will stand by what you said you would do is higher in politics than it is in the cutthroat world of real estate,” Schwartz added. “That’s a brutal environment in which misdirection and bullying and making one offer and changing it later are all common practice.”

Trump’s lack of ideological roots makes him an unusual figure in Washington, where most lawmakers adhere rigidly to their party’s agendas.

Trump has been traveling the country to pitch his plan for broad tax cuts, targeting in particular Manchin and other Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 in states Trump won last year. The president boasted this past week of being able to easily pass tax legislation this fall, even though a bill has not been introduced.

Schumer said the key to getting things done on Capitol Hill is for the president to take a back seat.

Schwartz said playing to Trump’s ego, as Graham has with his golf compliments, is an effective way to manage him. His advice to those seeking to make deals with Trump: Find the most persuasive way to portray one’s agenda as a personal victory for the president, and be the last person to talk to him. “Trump is motivated by the same concern in all situations, which is to dominate and to be perceived as having won,” Schwartz said. “That supersedes everything, including ideology.”

By Friday morning, Democrats had agreed to tweaks to incorporate new infrastructure spending in the bill and rethink the way the federal government would disburse money to cash-strapped cities and states. They had also brokered a deal targeting an extension of expanded unemployment payments.

Party leaders seemed ready to lower the amount from $400 to $300 per week, while extending an extra month of benefits, in an attempt to stop Manchin and other moderates from joining Republicans on a broader, last-minute effort to curtail the jobless aid. He did not respond to a request for comment.

A clear majority of Americans -- 60% -- approves of the new President's handling of the pandemic in a new CNN poll.

The virus is far from purged. Covid-19 variants may trigger a new spring surge in infections before vaccination campaigns can tamp them down. Republican governors racing to open their states with cases still at a high plateau could also cause a new wave of unnecessary deaths.

A fast-building southern border crisis threatens to turn into the first big non-Covid-19-related emergency of this presidency, with Biden yet to get a handle on a surge of undocumented child migrants across the border.

Biden's success -- along with Democratic leaders -- in piloting a massive piece of legislation through Congress despite the tightest of majorities in the first weeks of his presidency is a historic achievement that ranks alongside the fastest of starts by modern presidents. The new law delivers on his promise to send $1,400 stimulus payments to millions of Americans.

No longer does the president of the United States spend his time attacking American democracy, waging personal feuds on Twitter or cratering painstakingly brokered political compromises in Congress.

The overhaul of the US counter-pandemic strategy after Trump's denial and mismanagement and Biden's success in passing the Covid-19 rescue plan leave an impression that the new President is effectively wielding the tools of his office, after a lifetime Washington apprenticeship.

Biden's impact is also being felt in the way he has restored traditional expectations of presidential behavior and has projected human decency from the White House -- for instance, when he visited an old friend, former GOP Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, after his recent cancer diagnosis.

Since taking office, Biden has led the nation in mourning for 525,000 lost citizens and has managed a steady rise in vaccinations, which now average 2 million a day.

Early victories do not guarantee successful or ultimately popular presidencies. The job is so vast, and the challenges -- from domestic security threats to a sudden foreign policy crisis -- can be grave and unexpected. The pandemic, which destroyed the economy Trump had hoped to ride to reelection, is proof of that.

If Biden fails to get the immigration crisis under control, the success of passing the rescue plan may be quickly forgotten.

One crucial issue overshadowed by the race to vaccinate Americans and put them back to work is the unresolved threat to American democracy. Republican state legislators across the nation are rushing to suppress the potential vote of the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election with new laws that often directly discriminate against minority and Democratic voters.

Given such tests, Biden's objectively strong start to his presidency is only revealing the height of the political mountain up ahead.

Biden’s decision to stand down was a puzzling development given that there is no indication whatsoever that the Democratic legislation – which would create a national registry of police misconduct, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and overhaul qualified immunity protections for police officers – has any chance in the 50-50 Senate after it passed the House in March without GOP support.

The deep fissures in the Democratic party over what to do on the issue of policing have put Democrats in a difficult spot. During the 2020 elections, Republican hammered their Democratic opponents over radical calls to “defund the police” – attempting to portray all Democrats as sympathetic to a view that is held by a small minority.

It’s a major reason why congressional leaders like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the chamber, were quick to refute Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s argument that there should be “no more policing,” because, in her view, it cannot be reformed. “We’ve got to have police,” Clyburn said in an interview this week with CNN’s Don Lemon.

Protests erupted this week after the death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot by veteran Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center after he was initially pulled over for an expired tag and police learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a gross misdemeanor weapons charge.

Biden’s reticence reflects not only the deadlock in the deeply divided Congress, but also the fact that Democrats are still struggling to refine their message on police reform – knowing the issue will be a vulnerability at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024.

“There’s never gonna be justice for us,” Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, told reporters on Thursday. “Justice would bring our son home, knocking on the door with a big smile, coming in the house, sitting down eating dinner with us, going out to lunch, playing with his one-year-old – almost two-year-old-son, giving him a kiss before he walks out the door.”

in another difficult case, the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability released body-worn camera footage Thursday that shows a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month.

“The officer screamed at him, ‘Show me your hands,’ Adam complied, turned around, his hands were empty when he was shot in the chest at the hands of the officer,” Weiss-Ortiz told reporters Thursday. “If you’re shooting an unarmed child with his hands in the air, it is an assassination.”

Biden’s cautious posture on policing issues since he has become President reflects the arms-length distance that he has maintained from the progressive left on a number of politically-fraught issues, including calls from some Democrats to expand the size of the Supreme Court, the suggestion that he should be doing more on gun control following a recent spate of mass shootings, and fulfilling his own promise to raise the cap set on refugee admissions.

“I want to make it clear again: There is absolutely no justification – none – for looting, no justification for violence. Peaceful protest, understandable,” Biden said Monday. “We do know that the anger, pain, and trauma that exists in the Black community in that environment is real – it’s serious, and it’s consequential. But it will not justify violence and/or looting.”

t this pivotal moment when the nation is once again focused on the need to end these all-too-common occurrences, Biden seems uniquely positioned to take a leading role in brokering a compromise with Congress after his lifetime of work on crime and justice legislation.

Democrats’ sensitivity to those attacks was magnified this week by the swift response to Tlaib, a liberal Democrat, when she tweeted Monday that Wright’s death was not accident and “policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.

“This is not about policing. This is not about training. This is about recruiting. Who are we recruiting to be police officers? That to me is where the focus has got to go. We’ve got to have police officers,” Clyburn told Lemon on “CNN Tonight.”

But as incomprehensible police shootings multiply with devastating consequences for the families, there is a fierce urgency in this moment, particularly as the nation waits for the verdict in the Chauvin trial. Justice in policing might be “a cause” that is more convenient for Biden to tackle later in his presidency. But by standing down and waiting for others to act, he may well miss this moment.

So it sounds like a simple fix: Impose more friction at the major platform level and you’ll clean up the public square.

But it’s not actually that simple because friction runs counter to the very idea of the internet.

The fundamental precept of the internet is that it reduces marginal costs to zero. And this fact is why the design paradigm of the internet is to continually reduce friction experienced by users to zero, too. Because if the second unit of everything is free, then the internet has a vested interest in pushing that unit in front of your eyeballs as smoothly as possible.

the internet is “broken,” but rather it’s been functioning exactly as it was designed to:

Perhaps more than any other job in the world, you do not want the President of the United States to live in a frictionless state of posting. The Presidency is not meant to be a frictionless position, and the United States government is not a frictionless entity, much to the chagrin of many who have tried to change it. Prior to this administration, decisions were closely scrutinized for, at the very least, legality, along with the impact on diplomacy, general norms, and basic grammar. This kind of legal scrutiny and due diligence is also a kind of friction--one that we now see has a lot of benefits. 

The deep lesson here isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the collision between the digital world and the real world.

In the real world, marginal costs are not zero. And so friction is a desirable element in helping to get to the optimal state. You want people to pause before making decisions.

described friction this summer as: “anything that inhibits user action within a digital interface, particularly anything that requires an additional click or screen.” For much of my time in the technology sector, friction was almost always seen as the enemy, a force to be vanquished. A “frictionless” experience was generally held up as the ideal state, the optimal product state.

Trump was riding the ultimate frictionless optimized engagement Twitter experience: he rode it all the way to the presidency, and then he crashed the presidency into the ground.

From a metrics and user point of view, the abstract notion of the President himself tweeting was exactly what Twitter wanted in its original platonic ideal. Twitter has been built to incentivize someone like Trump to engage and post

The other day we talked a little bit about how fighting disinformation, extremism, and online cults is like fighting a virus: There is no “cure.” Instead, what you have to do is create enough friction that the rate of spread becomes slow.

Our challenge is that when human and digital design comes into conflict, the artificial constraints we impose should be on the digital world to become more in service to us. Instead, we’ve let the digital world do as it will and tried to reconcile ourselves to the havoc it wreaks.

And one of the lessons of the last four years is that when you prize the digital design imperatives—lack of friction—over the human design imperatives—a need for friction—then bad things can happen.

We have an ongoing conflict between the design precepts of humans and the design precepts of computers.

Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.

This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.

And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous.

Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.

[A] lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.

The digital world is designed to never forget anything. It has perfect memory. Forever. So that one time you made a crude joke 20 years ago? It can now ruin your life.

Memory in the carbon-based world is imperfect. People forget things. That can be annoying if you’re looking for your keys but helpful if you’re trying to broker peace between two cultures. Or simply become a better person than you were 20 years ago.

The digital and carbon-based worlds have different design parameters. Marginal cost is one of them. Memory is another.

2. Forget Me Now

1. Fix Tech, Fix America

But to many Palestinians, his likely replacement as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would be no improvement. Mr. Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, and a former settler leader who outright rejects Palestinian statehood.

Yet alongside last month’s deadly 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the worst bout of intercommunal Arab-Jewish violence to have convulsed Israel in decades, these disparate parts suddenly came together in a seemingly leaderless eruption of shared identity and purpose.

Among the Arab minority in Israel, many of whom define themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, the prospect of a new government has divided opinion. While the government would be led by Mr. Bennett, and packed with lawmakers who oppose a Palestinian state, some hoped the presence of three centrist and leftist parties in the coalition, coupled with the likely tacit support of Raam, an Arab Islamist party, might moderate Mr. Bennett’s approach.

The cabinet is expected to include at least one Arab, Esawi Frej, of the left-wing Meretz party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has said he will support the new government only if it grants more resources and attention to the Arab minority. And the likely appointment of a center-left minister to oversee the police force might encourage officers to take a more restrained approach to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, where clashes between the police and protesters played a major role in the buildup to the recent war in Gaza.

Mr. Trump’s administration helped broker a series of historic normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which bypassed the Palestinians and ruptured decades of professed Arab unity around the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinians have been aided by the international awakening and momentum of movements like Black Lives Matter, speaking the language of rights and historical justice, according to experts.

In a measure of the popular excitement about what would have been the first ballot in the occupied territories since 2006, more than 93 percent of eligible Palestinians had registered to vote, and 36 parties with about 1,400 candidates planned to compete for 132 seats in the Palestinian assembly. Nearly 40 percent of the candidates were 40 or younger, according to the Palestinian Central Elections Commission.

Some analysts say they doubt that this recent flash of Palestinian unity will have any immediate, profound impact on the Palestinian reality. But others argue that after years of stagnation, the Palestinian cause is back with a new sense of energy, connectivity, solidarity and activism.

The events of the last few weeks were “like an earthquake,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned Palestinian leader and former senior official. “We are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down or censor it.”

We must work to uphold and enable the Palestinian National Authority. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, has a crucial role in furthering any future peace negotiations. His role as a national leader has been overshadowed by Hamas' recent conflict with Israel, yet he has all the credentials and willingness to return to the table for serious and meaningful discussions. Elevating Abbas in the eyes of the world will bring him back into his historic role as chief negotiator for the Palestinian people; after all, no one on the Palestinian side has worked more on the vision of a two state solution than President Abbas.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would bar government and local law enforcement agencies from purchasing the location data of U.S. citizens without a warrant. The “Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act” [PDF] would also criminalize the police use of “illegitimately obtained” data from technology brokers such as Clearview AI, a biometrics firm that has scraped and sold billions of photos from social media and other websites

Facebook announced that it had broken up two separate Palestinian hacker groups—one with alleged ties to the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS), the intelligence service of the Palestinian Authority, and the other, known as Arid Viper, with reported links to the Hamas militant group.

the PSS-backed hackers are believed to be based in the West Bank and target entities primarily in Palestine and Syria, with a lesser focus on Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. Their targets include journalists, critics of the Palestinian government, human rights activists, and military groups such as the Syrian opposition and Iraqi military.

China spent months batting away resentment and distrust as the place where the pandemic began, but in recent weeks its diplomats, pharmaceutical executives and other power brokers have been fielding scores of requests for vaccines from desperate officials in Latin America, where the pandemic is taking a devastating toll that grows by the day.

The renewed focus on gun control is expected to cast attention back on Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who opposes dismantling the legislative filibuster but has long labored — fruitlessly — to pass a bipartisan control proposal.

Following the 2012 shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Manchin brokered a deal with Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, to close legal loopholes that allow people who purchase firearms at gun shows or on the internet to avoid background checks

Martial law has also been declared in some regions of Azerbaijan.

The conflict in the Caucasus Mountains has remained unresolved for more than three decades, with periodic bouts of fighting.

Iran, which borders both Azerbaijan and Armenia, offered to broker peace talks.

an attack on civilian settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh, including the regional capital Stepanakert, began at 08:10 local time (04:10 GMT) on Sunday.

Armenia's government declared martial law and total military mobilisation,

Warning that the region was on the brink of a "large-scale war", and accusing Turkey of "aggressive behaviour", he urged the international community to unite to prevent any further destabilisation.

Azerbaijanis are a predominantly Turkic people with whom Turkey has close ties, although unlike Turks, most Azerbaijanis are Shia, not Sunni, Muslims. Turkey does not have relations with Armenia, a mainly Orthodox Christian country which has historically looked to Russia for support.

Iran, a mainly Shia state, has a large ethnic Azerbaijani community but maintains good relations with Russia. They and Turkey, a Nato member, back opposing sides in Syria's ongoing civil war.

the ethnic divisions in Armenia and Azerbaijan have become even starker

“Patriots are in control,” and said, “We are in the Capitol building, 1776 will commence again.”

Over 70 arrests have been made in relation to the riots, and at least 170 cases have been opened. Many of the mob participants have been easily identified through their social media posts.

Ms. Hernandez was seen in numerous videos and photographs holding Ms. Pelosi’s splintered nameplate like a prized keepsake. According to documents from the F.B.I., the agency received tips about Ms. Hernandez from her friends and acquaintances after she posted pictures and videos of herself parading around with the nameplate on Facebook and Snapchat. One tipster recognized her from a widely circulated video by ITV News, which is based in Britain.

Jenna Ryan, a real estate broker from Frisco, Texas, who took a private plane to Washington to participate in the mob, was also charged on Friday

Only the most ardent political junkies closely follow the re-shuffling and re-drawing of legislative and congressional districts that follow the decennial census. (Guilty, your honor!)

In fact, like many things that the general public either knows nothing about or has a decided lack of interest in, how these lines are drawn and by whom has an outsized impact on the sort of government we have -- and what the motivations of our elected officials are.

For decades, the line-drawing process has fallen, in most states, to state legislators and governors. What that has meant, in the main, is that when Democrats control the state capitol and, therefore, the line-drawing process, they create districts that are as favorable as possible for their side.

The strategy of both sides has been simple: Pack as many of the opposition party's voters into as few districts in the state as possible while spreading out their own voters to make as many districts winnable for their side as they can. Innovations in redistricting software have made this slicing and dicing of people based on their party registration or past voting history an art form -- allowing the line-drawers to literally go street by street when it comes to crafting new districts.

The state's congressional districts have regularly changed hands between the parties, with Republicans winning two previously-held Democratic seats in the 2020 election. And generally speaking, three of the four districts in the state -- the exception being the Republican-friendly 4th in western Iowa -- are extremely competitive every two years. Check out the winning percentages for four incoming members of Congress in the state: 62%, 49%, 50% and 51.3%. In the state's 2nd District, the Republican candidate leads the Democrat candidate by six -- SIX! -- votes.

The vast majority of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, represent what we would call "safe" districts -- meaning that their only chance of losing their job would be in a primary, not a general election.

In 1956, for example, less than 6 in 10 House incumbents won with 60% of the vote or more, according to Vital Statistics on Congress. By 2002, the first election after the 2001 nationwide redistricting, 85% of all House incumbents seeking reelection won with 60% or higher. In 2014 and 2016, that number hovered in the mid-to-high 70s before dipping to just 63% in the tumultuous 2018 midterm election.

The practical, political effect of this trend is simple: Members of Congress have little reason to demonstrate their ability to work across the partisan aisle and every reason to be as partisan and ideological as possible in hopes of staving off any sort of primary challenge.

Independent or bipartisan commissions to redraw the maps in states -- as Hogan is trying to do in Maryland -- work to reorient the incentive structure for members by creating districts that are far more competitive between the two parties in general elections.

Maps drawn over the past two decades -- by Democrats and Republicans -- in places like North Carolina, Texas and yes, Maryland -- have come under legal scrutiny for using political considerations as the sole motivator in creating legislative and congressional districts. Maps in which one party overreached have, occasionally, led to unpredictable results in which the party in power loses seats they expected to win because they tried to divide up their own voters among too many districts.

While bipartisan -- and independent -- line-drawing commissions are on the rise in recent years, the majority of states in the country still rely on politicians to draw lines.

The North test-fired a ballistic missile just three weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration four years ago

“Pyongyang is signaling that denuclearization is not on the cards and that it will continue to develop its nuclear program as long as there is no agreement with Washington to halt it,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, KF-VUB Korea chair at the Institute for European Studies in Brussels.

The details on weapons might be partially an attempt to grab focus away from the country’s economic woes. During the pandemic, North Korea sealed itself off from the outside world, letting border trade with China and foreign travel plummet and leading to what was likely the worst economic slide in a generation last year.

Trump's departure amounts to a blissful lifting of a four-year pall on American life and the end to a tortured stretch of misconduct and indignities

At least some of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in November are sad to see him go. Scores of them attempted an insurrection at the US Capitol this month to prevent it from happening at all. The less violent view him as a transformative President whose arrival heralded an end to political correctness and whose exit marks a return to special treatment for immigrants, gays and minorities.

In his final days, Trump has been surrounded by a shrinking circle of associates, many of them decades younger. Old friends who used to speak with him regularly said they can no longer reach him

The violent mob attack on the citadel of American democracy capped a presidency built upon disregard for democratic norms, antagonizing government institutions and willful ignorance of the far right's violent and racist tendencies.

There is no evidence the President has reckoned with the consequences of his actions; the opposite appears to be true. He came to regret a concession video he had recorded at the urging of his family and advisers, who told him he was seriously close to being removed from office.

Freshly impeached for a second time, this time with support from a few Republicans, Trump ends his term with the lowest approval rating of his tenure. Republicans remain divided on whether he represents the future of their party.

One thing Trump's presidency undoubtedly accomplished: revealing in stark fashion the racist, hate-filled, violent undercurrents of American society that many had chosen previously to ignore. It became impossible to overlook as Trump's presidency concluded with violent riots of White nationalists and neo-Nazis at the Capitol.

He even had a falling-out with his vice president, Mike Pence, whose characteristic fealty was severed after he heard nothing from Trump while mobs appeared to be hunting him during the insurrection attempt

They appeared to reconcile, but other senior Republicans began breaking with the President, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican.

Ten Republicans voted for his impeachment in the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.

Instead of attending his successor's inauguration, Trump is departing the White House early to attend a military-style sendoff at Joint Base Andrews. He balked at the idea of leaving Washington an ex-president and did not particularly relish the thought of requesting use of the presidential aircraft from Biden

Trump is the first president in 150 years to stage such a boycott. While Pence will attend Biden's swearing-in, other members of Trump's family, including wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, will be absent.

Trump enters his post-presidency facing swirling legal matters and with the fate of his business empire in doubt.

Without some of the protections afforded him by the presidency, Trump will become vulnerable to multiple investigations looking into possible fraud in his financial business dealings as a private citizen.

Even as he exits the White House, there is little question that Trump's shadow will cloud the capital for the foreseeable future. The matter of his impeachment still lingers in the Senate, which will begin a trial after Biden is sworn in. And Trump's influence on his party's direction going forward will amount to a reckoning for conservatives, who now must decide whether theirs is the party of a president who incited an insurrection on his way out of office.

Trump has left the Republican Party in civil war.

Trump has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in a leadership PAC formed after the election that he will be able to use for future political activity, including boosting candidates. There are few restrictions on how the money can be used.

But since then, officials have cast doubt on his intentions, suggesting instead he was more interested in keeping the potential 2024 GOP field in limbo rather than seriously contemplating another run.

The results of Trump's presidency are not particularly mixed. While there have been some achievements -- a reshaped Supreme Court, a dismantled regulatory state and the brokering of diplomatic achievements in the Middle East -- Trump's overarching legacy is one of division and rancor capped by the catastrophic events of January 6, when he had 14 days left in his term.

"This is more work than in my previous life," he told Reuters 100 days into the job. "I thought it would be easier."

Trump had spent his previous decades cultivating a public profile as a savvy businessman and larger-than-life New York City mogul, despite a succession of bankruptcies and collapses. His second act as a reality television star with a penchant for race-baiting conspiracies (such as questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace) led into his third act as president, and along with it an eye toward artifice and spectacle.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's ties to Russia proved an immense distraction that preoccupied both the President and his White House. It resulted in the convictions of several Trump associates, many of whom he pardoned.

Instead of rising to the difficulties, Trump amended the job to fit his own liking. He mostly skipped reading lengthy intelligence documents, preferring in-person briefings that on some occasions left out important information about which Trump would later claim ignorance.

Most tragically, Trump showed little interest in leading the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, self-styling himself a "wartime leader" for a few days before reverting to downplaying the crisis and eventually pretending it did not exist

. A fateful invitation to attend Bastille Day in Paris in 2017 turned Trump on to the thrills of a military parade, which he unsuccessfully lobbied for in Washington for another three years.

On Thursday morning, GameStop shares spiked to $467 but then crashed to $126 as investors were unable to purchase more shares. As of 8:46 a.m. PT, the stock's price had rebounded to $207.90.

"In the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients, we have put in place several restrictions on some transactions in $GME [GameStop], $AMC [AMC Theaters] and other securities," reads the TD Ameritrade message.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have been seeking to highlight his remaining popularity with Republican voters as the Senate trial is set to begin in less than two weeks. All but five Republicans voted on Tuesday to toss out the impeachment case against him as unconstitutional, reflecting how reluctant members of his party are to abandon Mr. Trump even after he has left office.

Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “A united conservative movement will strengthen the bonds of our citizens and uphold the freedoms our country was founded on.”

Mr. McCarthy tempered his criticism, saying he did not believe that the former president “provoked” the Capitol attack, and that while Mr. Trump bore “some responsibility,” so did “everybody across this country.”

A US convoy departing from Kobani Landing Zone (KLZ) on Sunday will have "robust air assets monitoring the progress of the convoy" during troop re-deployment, as part of the "deliberate withdrawal from Northeast Syria," according to a statement from US Colonel Myles B. Caggins III, a Coalition military spokesman.

Attacks from the Turkish military and Turkish back militants have resulted in "16 martyrs and three wounded in our ranks," in a 24 hour period, according to an official statement released today by the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) press office.

Turkish forces and their allies continue to launch attacks on Syrian villages despite agreeing to a ceasefire, according to the statement, which says Turkish forces have targeted villages near Ras al-Ain "by aerial bombardments and brought in more troops and preparations for the ceasefire areas

The Turkish Defense Ministry tweeted on Sunday saying, "Despite the agreement with the US, there have been 22 harassment/violations," since the ceasefire began on Thursday. 

Earlier Sunday, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the US-brokered ceasefire in northern Syria "generally seems to be holding" despite "reports of intermittent fires," but he could not say who is committing those violations. 

A US official confirmed the ground move, the largest the US has made in Syria so far, marks the symbolic end of the major US presence in the region. 

A senior US official later clarified that the location of the 1,000 troops is fluid, indicating it’s possible that not all 1,000 would be relocated to western Iraq. Any relocation out of Syria will be done in conjunction with host country governments, the official added

Pompeo said he got a report this morning from senior leaders indicating there is “relatively little fighting” in the region. He said the hope is that the ceasefire between Turkish and Syrian-Kurdish forces will hold.

The secretary of state quelled this concern, saying that the statement the US released jointly with Turkey after negotiations this week made it clear there would not be attacks on minorities in the region.

Mr. Trump said at the time that steel tariffs on Turkey would rise to 50 percent from 25 percent.

The crisis erupted after Mr. Erdogan told Mr. Trump in an Oct. 6 phone call that he intended to invade northeastern Syria. Mr. Trump withdrew several dozen American troops in the region to clear them from harm’s way, effectively giving Turkey a green light for the incursion. Mr. Trump’s decision blindsided many senior administration officials.