On Friday evening, Karen Giorno, a former senior adviser on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, addressed a few dozen volunteers for Bob Gray, one of 18 candidates running for Congress in a special election this week in Georgia’s 6th District. The seat, which once belonged to Newt Gingrich, was supposed to be safely Republican. Former Rep. Tom Price, who stepped aside to become Trump’s secretary of health and human services, won November’s election by 23 points.

Earlier this month, a few days after the New York Times published the report that would ignite the explosion of Bill O’Reilly’s cable-news career, I tuned in to The O’Reilly Factor. The Times had uncovered five sexual harassment lawsuits that either Fox News or O’Reilly himself had paid to settle, and I wanted to see if he would address the revelations on his own show. He didn’t, of course.

BLUFFTON, South Carolina—Rep. Mark Sanford is a rare sort. He’s the first politician I’ve ever met to insist that a reporter speak with constituents at his events who strongly disagree with him. There were many of those to be found on Tuesday morning, as the conservative congressman and former governor held a series of public events in his low country coastal district that became cathartic anti-Republican therapy sessions. Oddly, Sanford seemed fine with it. He seemed to welcome it.

In 1924, Marianne Moore wrote a multistanza poem about Jared Kushner. Called “An Octopus,” its ostensible subject was a cephalopod-shaped glacier on Mount Rainer, “deceptively reserved,” “polite,” with a “ghostly pallor,” its arms “as with meditated stealth … seeming to approach from all directions.” The ice looks clean, pretty, and delicate. It is fringed by fir trees that remind Moore of “our American royal families.

Say what you will about the headdesk-inducing columns of the New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, but don’t say she didn’t warn us.Spayd, a former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and managing editor of the Washington Post, made her mission clear when she took on the prominent post of in-house critic and reader liaison at the Times last summer.

When Ivanka Trump went on CBS News last week and mauled the word “complicit” into a smoking heap of linguistic oblivion, it was almost too easy to mock her for presumptuously assuming she couldredefine a chunk of the English language to fit her own moral ends. Perhaps the conviction that words mean only what the wealthy would like them to mean is an inherited trait.

What is President Trump’s policy in Syria? How far would he go to rein in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad? Nobody knows, and Trump won’t say. Even after authorizing a missile strike on a Syrian air base in response to Assad’s poison-gas attack on civilians, Trump won’t spell out the limits of his intervention or what might provoke him further. “We’re not going into Syria,” Trump assured Americans in a recentFox News interview.

In March 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, then–Maj. Gen. David Petraeus turned to embedded reporter Linda Robinson and famously asked: “Tell me how this ends.”That question has never fully been answered in Iraq, despite the expenditure of huge sums of American blood and treasure.

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-March, Sean Spicer ran an errand at the Apple Store. There, arms laden with various chargers, he encountered a hailstorm of questions—far more aggressive than any he’d fielded in his weekday job as White House press secretary.

On Thursday, an American missile strike destroyed the air base from which Syrian government forces launched a chemical weapons attack that killed 80 civilians. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons,” said President Trump, speaking from his vacation resort at Mar-a-Lago. Just a few days earlier, the Trump administration had taken the view that the U.S.