Latest news with #Day-Glo
Eater
22-05-2025
- Eater
The Eater Guide to Road Trippin' Nevada
Nevada became a state in 1864 — months before a saloon in a town called Genoa posted a wanted sign for Abraham Lincoln's then-unknown assassin, four years before the transcontinental railroad stitched the state to the rest of the country, and five years before the first major silver strike in the U.S. sparked a rush that built Virginia City nearly overnight. Over the next 50 years, towns flickered to life and blinked out of existence, chasing the veins of silver and metal some 200 feet beneath the desert's hard-packed earth — land long inhabited by Indigenous communities of the Great Basin, like the Paiute and Shoshone, and the Washoe near Lake Tahoe. The boom-and-bust rhythm shaped not just the state's economy but its identity — a place built on promise, reinvention, and stories that survived long after the mines ran dry. It's easy to picture Nevada as a stretch of dusty nothing between Las Vegas and Reno. But the state is more than its desert scrub. There are the spire-like slot canyons of Cathedral Gorge, the snowy ranges of the Ruby Mountains, and the stargazing solitude of Great Basin National Park. Serpentine highways weave past alien-themed diners, larger-than-life cinderblock women, and Day-Glo boulders stacked like cairns. The surreal lives here — tucked just off the next exit. And beyond the haunted hotel rooms and Wild West souvenir shops, there is, and has always been, the grounding presence of a dining room table. The boom-and-bust rhythm shaped not just the state's economy but its identity — a place built on promise, reinvention, and stories that survived long after the mines ran dry. In early Virginia City, saloons evolved from watering holes into community hubs, where mahogany bartops ferried slippery mugs of ale with the same rapidity as the conversation surrounding it. In the middle of the state, where one of the world's largest Basque communities put down roots, traditional restaurants still serve family-style courses of charbroiled steaks and roasted salmon to communal tables. At the southern tip, Las Vegas's most coveted seat is at an 18-stool countertop at the Oyster Bar, where round-the-clock lines wait for thick, creamy pan roasts brimming with seafood. And even today, in a town of just a few dozen residents, one restaurant draws visitors from around the world — strangers who lean over flying saucer-shaped burgers and pies to trade stories of strange lights in the night sky. There's nothing more inherently Nevadan than the open road. Once braved by wagon, then rail, and now car, it's still the best way to cross the state. So take to its desert highways and come hungry. Whether you seek idyllic desert landscapes, the kind of art that only a dust-addled mind could divine, or meals that are worth driving a few hundred miles to enjoy, Nevada has something waiting — and it's worth the drive. —Janna Karel, Eater, editor, Southern California/Southwest Credits
Eater
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
Welcome to Weird, Wild, Wonderful Nevada
To many outsiders, Nevada is just the desert landmass that surrounds the glamorous, neon-drenched dreamscape of Las Vegas — a state whose name is mispronounced as often as it's misunderstood (it's Nev- add -uh). Others know Nevada to be ghost country, not just for its literal ghost towns, but for the apparitions rumored to haunt its century-old hotels and saloons. The state is, of course, the backdrop to Area 51 and (allegedly) classified extraterrestrial activity. It's the collective memory of mushroom clouds blossoming over the Mojave Desert. It's the rootin'-tootin' Wild West. These images all coalesce into the tapestry of a state unified by the weird, wild, and wonderful. All of this to say, Nevada isn't just drawn to the strange — it depends on it. Its history, infrastructure, and identity have been stitched together in secrecy and by speculation, which, in turn, have shaped the state's appetite for the uncanny, the campy, and the downright surreal. I've lived in the Battle Born State since I was 14. Zak Bagans's haunted museum sits just down the street from my house. The bar where my friends and I regularly celebrate birthdays glows with Atomic Age memorabilia. My weekend road trips include renegade art exhibits of upturned cars and spectral recreations of The Last Supper , often bookended by stops at alien-themed gas stations and beef jerky stands. Here, roadside restaurants and watering holes serve as waypoints and mythmakers, where strangers trade ghost stories over hotel bar counters, gather in a restaurant near Area 51 to compare unexplainable night sky sightings, and refuel with cherry-steeped beer from a remote brewery that alone can justify an hourslong drive. My previous road trips throughout the state have featured stops at attractions that are pointedly bizarre — like artist Ugo Rondinone's psychedelic Day-Glo monoliths that comprise Seven Magic Mountains. I've journeyed to many geologically surreal destinations: Take, for example, the soaring spires and person-wide slot canyons that rise from the pale siltstone and clay shale of Cathedral Gorge State Park. For the past decade, I have been telling my friends that next year is the year that I'll join them on a silica-coated dry lake bed managed by the Bureau of Land Management for Burning Man, where some 70,000 people erect a city of tents, temples, and flame-spewing octopuses every August leading up to Labor Day. 'The West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach.' Nevadans may be uniquely predisposed to look for things that are weird , says Michael Green, chair of UNLV's history department. Consider the boom-and-bust mining towns of early Nevada and the resulting transience that lends itself to ghost stories. There's Area 51 and the patchwork of lore regarding what secretly goes on beyond its gates, just 80 miles outside of Las Vegas. Even today, more than 80 percent of the state's land is federally owned. 'There is some degree of secrecy associated with federal land; there is also a degree of secrecy associated with the mob,' Green says. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the mob — more specifically, the American Mafia — exerted sweeping control over Las Vegas casinos: It built them, ran them, and controlled the flow of money both on and off the books. The mob's goings-on were generally limited to verbal agreements and handshake deals, with documents minimally used and even written in code. 'There are so many things that have been done behind the scenes, under the table, that we figured there has to be more to the story,' Green says. Nevada's preoccupation with the weird isn't just about secrets; it's also about the inherent wistfulness of the American Southwest. There's the nostalgia shaped by the open road, Route 66, and cowboy iconography — all shorthand within pop culture for individualism and escape. For longtime Nevadans, that nostalgia may be more textured, based on yearning for a slower pace or the do-it-yourself era of Las Vegas before corporate monoculture took over the Strip. More broadly, the West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach. In April, I traveled 479 miles to see the weirdest and wildest lore-steeped sites in Nevada. Flying 80 miles an hour down the 95 — past sun-hardened rock faces and thorny desert scrub — I blearily had visions of making the same trip by foot and on horseback. In Tonopah, Nevada, I read an epitaph for a pair of brothers buried in the cemetery next to the Clown Motel: two boys who grew up in Montenegro, traveled to the shores of the Adriatic Sea, then boarded a steamship to journey to the United States — only to be killed by a runaway mine cart 200 feet beneath the desert town. I stood in the shade of the Mission Revival-style railroad depot in Rhyolite, now a ghost town, where fortune-seekers arrived by train in 1907 with the promise of building a life in the state's biggest mining camp — only to board that same train just one year later when the town began to decline. I traced my fingers over the bullet holes in the walls of Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, Nevada, and sensed the presence of the miner who lost his life over a poker game gone wrong. This highway-honed wistfulness has become an integral part of Nevada's folklore. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Nevada was in the thick of its mining boom, stories abounded of rich deposits gone lost. These narratives often took the form of an old prospector who emerged from the wilderness, unable to recall where he found the treasure, historian Ronald M. James writes in Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West. Others involved 'a dog running off, leading its owner on an untrodden path, or a donkey kicking a rock that reveals the gleam of gold.' This trope is behind the apocryphal story of Jim Butler, the prospector whose accidental discovery of the Mizpah Ledge silver vein led to Tonopah's founding: One of his donkeys wandered off, and when he picked up a rock to throw at it, he was struck by the stone's unusual weight. If I wanted to better understand my state's fascination with the weird, I reasoned that I should follow Butler's path to what is now Tonopah, for a stay at the Mizpah Hotel. I want to be clear: I don't believe in ghosts. But that doesn't mean the idea of them doesn't scare me. So I passed on the opportunity to book the Mizpah Hotel's Lady in Red Suite — a room that had been the private quarters of a sex worker, known in thinly veiled misogynistic lore as the 'Lady in Red,' who was murdered by a jealous client more than a century ago and is rumored to wander the halls since. 'Visitors report seeing her. Some staff have seen her. She really likes to frequent the fifth floor,' says Chavonn Smith, the front desk manager of the Mizpah. 'She's not an angry ghost. But she does not like women very much.' Instead, I booked a room where my bed was an old-timey wooden wagon. Feigning bravery, I joined a ghost tour that began in the hotel's turn-of-the-century lobby — marked by burgundy patterned carpet, frosted-glass chandeliers, and Victorian camelback settees that seem made for collapsing onto should any of the basement's rumored inhabitants appear. Only when we reached the unfinished floor that once held the hotel's safe did our guide tell us the story of three enterprising miners who tunneled beneath the hotel and emerged through the bottom of the vault. After securing the hotel's riches, one of the miners turned on the others. The next morning, the hotel manager unlocked the safe to find the money gone — and two dead miners left in its place. Visitors still recount catching glimpses of the betrayed miners at the hotel bar, their heads translucent and capped with carbide lamp helmets. Sure, these tales are tall. But in Nevada, ghost stories are more than just marketing or tourism fodder. In Monumental Lies, James writes that from their earliest days, Nevadans have entertained the idea of ghosts. Long before mining towns spun tales of haunted saloons, Indigenous communities of the Great Basin — like the Paiute and Shoshone, and the Washoe near Lake Tahoe — shared stories of ghosts that warned of danger and spirits tied to sacred waters and ancestral places. As James notes, 'much was appropriated but then confused, while other traditions were imagined and projected onto the cultures of the American Indians' — a tangle that shaped the state's early folklore into a mix of belief, invention, and sometimes mockery of its earliest inhabitants. 'Tonopah has a population of about 2,000 people — 6,000 if you count the clowns.' What makes Nevada's ghost stories feel different — weirder, even — than those of other allegedly haunted states is how deeply they're rooted in its roads. In much the same way that cities like Tonopah, Goldfield, and Virginia City were built on the promise of silver, so too are they now buoyed by haunted tourism. 'For many today, a pivotal way to approach the past is by contemplating its spiritual residue,' writes James. Stories like those of the betrayed miners — tales of greed, ambition, and unresolved endings — are part of how Nevadans make sense of a landscape shaped by boomtowns, busts, and disappearances. In a place where so much has been hidden or lost, locals and travelers continue to try to conjure spirits that may or may not have reason to linger. Tonopah has a population of about 2,000 people — 6,000 if you count the clowns. The 33-room Clown Motel opened in 1985 with a modest personal collection of 150 clown statues. When former art director Hame Anand took over as the motel's CEO in 2019, he ran with the theme — adding thousands of clown murals, portraits, marionettes that probably come alive at night, masks that will almost certainly fuse to your face if you get too close, and one clown statue that I swear I saw wink at me. The whole thing is galling, baffling, deeply unsettling — and, naturally, a must-see tourist destination. The motel's property backs up to another supposedly haunted locale: the town's old cemetery. Here, century-old headstones are updated by the Central Nevada Historical Society to include causes of death. Wandering through the copse of wooden crosses and metal tombstones tells the story of small-town Nevada in the early 1900s — where the Marojevech brothers failed to halt a runaway mine cart in the Belmont Mine, where local hero Big Bill Murphy was killed rescuing others in a fire in 1911, and where the 'Tonopah plague' caused the deaths of 56 people in a four-month span in 1905. It's a ledger of early Nevada, an undercurrent of reality beneath the honky-tonk myth of the Wild West. Before hitting the road, I had lunch at Tonopah Brewing Co., where the walls are lined with awards for brewmaster Edward Nash's tart fruited sours. But the food here is a sleeper hit, far better than one may expect from a brewery in Middle of Nowhere, Nevada. A French dip sandwich piles tender roast beef onto a pretzel roll slathered with horseradish and flanked by a glimmering side of jus. Molten fried cheese curds beg to be dunked into their accompanying ranch dressing. A Nashville-style hot fried chicken sandwich gets topped with a stack of cooling pickles and coleslaw. It all paired well with a flight of beers — the Cherry 51 witbier, brewed with cherries, and the Honey Wheat ale stood out as my favorites. Driving back down to Las Vegas, I stopped in Goldfield (population: 231), with my sights set on the International Car Forest of the Last Church. Weird art in Nevada is hardly limited to the tech scion-curated display in Black Rock City. Dozens of junk cars, school buses, and ice cream trucks are half-buried like offerings, their hoods entombed in the hard earth, tail lights propped up like grave markers, chassis exposed like bodies after exhumation. These cars await wandering artists who will anoint them with spray paint. Is this a meditation on decay? A post-industrial necropolis? A bold indictment of consumerism's terminal velocity? Or — and stay with me here — is it just extremely funny to bury a minivan in the desert and hand out cans of Krylon like communion wafers? Art is subjective. Seeking more weird desert art, I ventured to Rhyolite (population: 0), a ghost town once so destined to be the largest mining operation in the state that a railroad was built in 1906 to connect it to Las Vegas. A Mission Revival depot soon followed, servicing the 50 freight cars that ran per day. But within months of its completion, more people were leaving Rhyolite than arriving, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Just downhill from the depot — and the crumbling remains of the bank and schoolhouse — lies the Goldwell Open Air Museum. Thirteen spectral figures, cloaked in gauzy white plaster, loom over the sand in a ghostly parody of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper . Rooftops peek out of the ground as if they're being swallowed by quicksand. A 25-foot woman made out of pink cinder blocks — with yellow brick accents to indicate both her blond locks and pubic hair — stares silently into the distance. Nevada's desert is part excavation site, part sandbox: a squared-off plot where some come to unearth buried histories, while others come to play — shaping odd monuments before the wind levels them flat. Nowhere is that tension more vivid than in Rhyolite, where past ambition and present-day absurdity share the same forsaken earth. Alongside its ghost stories and surrealist desert art, Nevada also deals its own brand of extraterrestrial weird. Driving south from Rhyolite into Las Vegas brought me to the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley — a Brat -green gift shop/gas station/frozen yogurt cafe decorated in cardboard clip art aliens. It sells alien-face thongs; green-handed back scratchers; vials of soil allegedly sourced from Area 51; 'Interstellar Sandwiches,' including a triple-decker club and drippy 'Alien Burgers' with sauteed mushrooms; and, for $5, a turban-clad Alien Zoltar, who predicts that something lost will turn up very soon. This is the kitschy end of Nevada's alien fixation — part roadside spectacle, part intergalactic fever dream — joined by the E.T. Fresh Jerky bungalow in Lincoln County, the Outpost 51 Alien Museum in Boulder City, and the Alien Fresh Jerky compound just over the border in Baker, California, where a full-size UFO hotel is under construction. The next day, I drove up Route 375 — better known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. The official road marker bearing that name, perched atop two 12-foot-tall poles, had previously been stickered into illegibility. The highway winds past the legendary Black Mailbox, rumored to be a drop site for alien communications, and the arched, galvanized metal Alien Research Center fronted by a towering metal figure. (I'm pretty sure the latter is a gift shop, though it's never been open when I've passed through.) Follow the road and eventually you'll drive through the gates of Area 51. But about 25 miles before that, you'll arrive at the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada (population: 48). Little A'Le'Inn has become a haven for the alien-obsessed, but its namesake stems from a typo, not anything out of this universe. After buying the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1988, owner Connie West tells me that her parents intended to name the cafe the 'Little Ale'Inn' — a nod to the ales they served. But a printer's error on the sign — an errant apostrophe — turned it into a name that just happened to rhyme with 'alien,' West says, around the same time Las Vegas reporter George Knapp was breaking Bob Lazar's now-infamous claims about working on an extraterrestrial spacecraft near Area 51. For West, the name feels almost like fate. Before Matty Roberts' viral Facebook event, 'Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us,' thrust the Little A'Le'Inn into the national spotlight, the restaurant had already cultivated its own community — one made up of UFO chasers and roadtrippers, or, as West puts it, 'people who want to travel, to see places, to get off the pavement and the beaten path.' Visitors come with photographs of their own UFO sightings in hand. They mail West Polaroids and handwritten testimonials, many of which are taped on the restaurant's gallery walls. The photos make me think about the unwavering light I saw bobbing over Great Basin National Park last summer. If I had snapped a photo, would it have made West's wall? Beyond the displays of photos and Area 51 memorabilia is a smattering of mismatched tables and chairs, a bar where customers sign dollar bills to be suspended from the ceiling, and a gift shop filled with bumper stickers and shot glasses ('Believe,' one reads). Outside, the restaurant is bordered by alien statues. A light-up flying saucer was a parting gift from the Galaxy Quest home-video release party, which took place in Little A'Le'Inn's parking lot. A tow truck suspends a satellite dish-sized metal UFO — plastered with stickers from travelers who've passed through — donated by a friend of West's father, Joe Travis. West says that a visiting artist asked for permission to paint on a blank wall. The artist left a purple mural of dead-eyed aliens, some engaged with humans in an interspecies kiss, that glows under black light. Over 'Saucer Burgers' and buttery white bread grilled cheese sandwiches, customers who commute among the Southwest's national parks — Zion to Yosemite is a common trail — pick up easy conversation at Little A'Le'Inn, comparing stories of unexplainable sightings in the night sky. West says it's this sense of openness and shared experience that has allowed the restaurant to continue to thrive. 'We have a unique place where you're free to communicate with each other [without judgment],' she says. 'I think that's why we have been in business so long.' Over time, Little A'Le'Inn became a nexus for weird Nevada experiences. There's a warmth in the conversations that happen here, knitted among friends and strangers — of strange bright lights in the sky, of encounters in the barren stretches of Nevada's night, of government secrets they seek to uncover. 'I personally believe that if you look up and you look out, it's too vast,' West tells me. 'There are strange things in the sky, things I can't explain. Hopefully, there's something else besides us.' In the 1950s, patrons at Atomic Liquors in Downtown Las Vegas looked up and out, too. They would gather on the roof of the city's first freestanding bar with cocktails in hand and watch nuclear test explosions bloom on the horizon, as if they were fireworks instead of fallout. Back then, atomic tourism was part of the spectacle — proof of progress and power. Today, that bar leans into its strange past, its walls lined with Atomic Age paraphernalia and standees of Miss Atomic Bomb in her mushroom cloud swimsuit. It's kitschy, yes, but also quietly haunting — a reminder that Nevada's fascination with the unknown has revolved around the existential as much as the extraterrestrial. In Nevada, weird isn't an outlier, it's the vernacular. From atomic tourism to ghost hotels, alien sightings to art cars, and all the tall tales of the Wild West, the state doesn't just tolerate the bizarre: It builds around it, sells tickets to it, leaves the lights on for it. Maybe all the UFOs were just weather balloons. Maybe the ghosts were just creaks in the night. And maybe that clown never winked at me. The stories here are strange, and the sights often stranger. But they help make sense of a place long defined by what slips through fingers — silver, water, time, truth. 'From the earliest days, the West was wilder, harder hitting, harder drinking, harder ... everything ... than elsewhere. We know this to be true because legends confirm it,' writes James. Call it mythmaking or marketing, but out here, weird works. Sign up for our newsletter.
Washington Post
10-04-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Trump's vision faces little internal dissent. Can a tariff crisis change that?
As stock markets swung wildly in recent days, spooked by President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, a few overseas circuit breakers halted frantic trades and initiated a mandatory cool-off period. But inside the White House, no circuit breakers engaged as Trump surged toward a long-sought tariff plan that he unveiled in the Rose Garden last week. Only on Wednesday did allies succeed in persuading Trump to pause many of the tariffs, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, tech billionaire Elon Musk and various titans of Wall Street mounted arguments to roll them back — and as financial markets experienced their greatest crisis since the start of the coronavirus pandemic five years ago. 'People were getting yippy,' Trump told reporters, explaining his sudden reversal. But he defended his decision to pursue a tariff agenda that brought the world to the brink of a global calamity, with economists increasingly predicting a recession. 'No other president would have done what I did,' Trump said. To current and former Trump officials, the tariff crisis is a harbinger of where the second term could be headed: a president unburdened by reelection, unmoved by outside counsel and with fewer guardrails to rein him in. Some longtime Republicans who served in the first administration and often opposed or slow-walked Trump's policies on trade, immigration and other priorities have been barred entry this time around, replaced by officials whose most salient quality in Trump's eyes appears to be their staunch support for his America First' agenda — and their personal loyalty to him. Less certain is whether the near-meltdown of the global economy this week will shift that quality of Trump's current term. The financial peril is not nearly over; Trump is standing by a nontrivial tariff of 10 percent for most imports, along with massive levies just for China. Other potentially tumultuous policy initiatives may loom: larger-scale deportations, changes to vaccine approvals, more aggression against allies. Will advisers be emboldened to continue pushing him away from the brink? Or will Trump grow impatient with the intervention that he clearly sought to avoid in his second act? Just hours before he partially reversed himself, Trump made clear where his heart wants to take him. 'This time, I'm doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,' he told Republican House members at a black-tie dinner Tuesday. From the start of the tariff rollout, Trump dictated the terms. He got the kind of curated event he loves, a Rose Garden announcement with workers in hard hats and Day-Glo vests. He got another favorite feature: days of worldwide media attention as the reaction and economic impact played out. Supporters see the past week as a victory, saying that the president has been further empowered to enact his agenda, which has long included imposing sweeping tariffs, deporting illegal immigrants and other goals that were sometimes stymied in his first term. 'He campaigned on these themes. He made these promises. … He deserves a team that's not going to countermand those directions,' said Paul Dans, who served in the first Trump administration and as director of the Heritage Foundation's personnel and policy plan known as Project 2025, which provided a road map for the new administration. 'There's plenty of other checks and balances on the president under our constitutional system, as well as the Fourth Estate.' Others praised Trump for his brinkmanship, saying that his tariff announcement had put pressure on other countries to make economic concessions to the United States. But eight former officials warned that flanking the president with loyalists less inclined to talk the president out of his worst impulses could backfire, evidenced by the days of financial chaos. Several pointed to the elevation of Peter Navarro, the White House economic aide who went to prison last year rather than testify before Congress about his involvement in Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, as one example. Navarro has been a staunch supporter of Trump's new tariff strategy. 'I think Trump was frustrated that he felt thwarted in the first administration on tariffs,' said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former vice president Mike Pence — one of the many former Trump 1.0 officials who is persona non grata in the second administration. 'There's part of him that wants to prove all of his naysayers wrong.' A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the White House's recent tariff deliberations would have unfolded much differently eight years ago — and no internal agreement would have been reached, most likely. 'Unlike the first term,' the official said, 'everyone here is aligned on a singular mission, and that's to provide the president with a wide amount of options so that then he can make his final decision.' Former officials also noted that some of the ideas Trump floated in his first term, only to be slow-walked by his aides — firing missiles into Mexico, revisiting the safety of childhood vaccines and other musings — could become realities in his second term, or already have taken shape. 'He was a hyperactive generator of ideas, many of them bad,' William P. Barr wrote in 'One Damn Thing After Another,' his memoir of serving as attorney general in the first Trump administration. In the book, Barr wrote that he and other senior officials batted around the 'legally problematic ideas' floated by the president and others, and traded roles on who would attempt to talk Trump down. 'We referred to this as choosing who would 'eat the grenade,' ' Barr wrote. Barr did not respond to a request for comment. 'Sometimes the worst thing for Trump was to 'let Trump be Trump,' ' said one former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations with the president. 'We had to protect the president from himself.' Asked about the White House's personnel strategy and past aides' criticism of the president, a spokesman criticized 'anonymous swamp bureaucrats' and said that Trump had received resounding support from voters for his agenda. 'The Trump administration is aligned on delivering on the American people's democratic mandate to change a broken status quo in Washington that oversaw tens of millions of illegal migrants walking into our country, countless Americans dying from drugs being trafficked in by terrorist cartels, and chronic trade deficits hollowing our country's industry,' White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. The personnel differences between the first and second Trump administration can be seen across government, where Trump has traded centrists, longtime politicians and executives from his first term for avowed supporters of his Make America Great Again agenda. Gone are financial officials such as Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, who dissuaded Trump from pushing tariffs last time. Also gone are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, family members who had walk-in privileges in the Oval Office and served as moderating forces by steering some hires and nudging the president toward the political center, former officials said. 'Trump and his circle believe that these traditional GOP types restrained him and that that was bad,' Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets, and an adviser to past GOP presidential candidates, wrote in a text message. Trump's first-term staffing also reflected the compressed deadline he faced to build a government in the wake of a surprise victory against Hillary Clinton. The result: an eclectic bunch of advisers with divergent ideologies — and levels of loyalty to Trump. 'In 2016 we won at the last second,' said Stephen K. Bannon, a top Trump adviser during his first campaign and the start of his presidency. 'We didn't even have a transition team set up before the day after we won.' In the four years between the president's first and second terms, Project 2025, the America First Policy Institute and other Trump-aligned initiatives sprang up. Trump assembled loyalists to run his campaign, including people who stood by him during months of political exile in 2021. Many are now working in the West Wing. Top advisers, including Stephen Miller, came highly prepared to act on Trump's long-stated goals, such as sweeping deportations and aggressive tariffs, as well as more recent grievances, such as punishments for law firms that have taken up cases against him. Anyone not on board with Trump's targets wasn't brought into the White House this time, allies have said. 'This has been years in the making, these executive orders as planned,' Bannon said, praising the White House's pace of issuing orders. 'You talk about urgency. Think of the thinking that went through putting the team together.' The approach has also meant trading expertise for loyalists, with striking results. In the first administration, advisers with conventional political or health-care backgrounds talked Trump out of plans to review the safety of decades-old vaccines, publicly praising the president as a measles outbreak spiked in early 2019. In the second administration, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime anti-vaccine activist who threw his support to Trump last year — has had a relatively free hand to raise vaccine questions, only grudgingly supporting measles vaccines as an outbreak rages, with two children already dead from the vaccine-preventable disease. Former Trump officials worry that the approach will backfire with more preventable deaths and, potentially, future public health crises. Others note how in the first Trump administration, the president regularly praised FEMA and deferred to its emergency-management leaders. In the second administration, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager and someone with no emergency-management expertise, is helping oversee the dismantling of that agency, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation. The effort has worried current and former officials who say it will backfire on Trump by weakening the disaster-response agency before this summer's hurricane season. FEMA referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to a request for comment. In their memoirs, former senior officials also recount numerous examples of Trump proposing ideas that they describe as ill-conceived, illegal and perilous to the global order — and their efforts to talk the president out of them. Mark T. Esper, Trump's former secretary of defense, described a conversation where the president mused about firing missiles into Mexican drug labs while publicly denying U.S. responsibility. 'This was not rational thinking. Moreover, it only underscored in my mind later how important it was for me to stay in my post,' Esper writes in 'A Sacred Oath,' describing how he warned Trump that the attack would represent an act of war and strategized to slow-walk the president's idea. 'What if another secretary of defense, my replacement, went along with this? Lord knows there were plenty of people in the mix who thought the president's outlandish ideas made sense.' Esper did not respond to a request for comment. Barr describes efforts to talk Trump out of ideas that Barr believed would backfire, such as the president's desired executive order on birthright citizenship. 'Sometimes it seemed the worse the idea, the more fixated on it he became,' Barr wrote in his memoir. This time, Trump signed such an order on his first day in office. Trump's push for tariffs also winds through multiple officials' memoirs, with aides discussing how they headed off his harshest policies. In his book, 'Breaking History,' Kushner relayed how he and other senior officials encouraged Trump to back off plans to immediately impose tariffs on Mexico in 2019. 'Trump consented to the one-week delay, a small but significant win that bought us a few days to try to broker a deal,' Kushner wrote in his memoir. A spokesperson for Kushner did not respond to a request for comment. Navarro, who repeatedly backed the president's push for tariffs, has voiced his frustration with the resistance in the first administration. 'I was a one-man China hawk band totally without power or allies in a White House filled with a symphony of Wall Street transactionalists and China dove appeasers,' Navarro wrote in his own memoir, 'In Trump Time.' Now, Navarro and his allies are ascendant in the West Wing — and their policies have begun to play out. 'It really is a story about first term versus second term,' said the senior White House official, talking about the process of landing on last week's tariff deal. 'It goes to show how the team is constructed in a way that's different from the first term.'
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Andrew Scott on ‘Vanya': ‘Who Isn't Sad?'
'I really believe that we all do contain multitudes,' Andrew Scott said on a Friday morning in March. Scott may contain more than most. An actor of unusual sensitivity and verve, he is starring, solo, in an Off Broadway production of Chekhov's melancholy comedy 'Uncle Vanya.' The title, like the cast list, has also been condensed, to just 'Vanya.' The New York transfer of this London production had opened a few nights before. In this version, the playwright Simon Stephens has relocated the action from 19th-century Russia to rural Ireland in more or less the present day. Scott plays the central character, a man who has sacrificed his own ambition to support his feckless brother-in-law. He also plays the brother-in-law, the put-upon niece, the neglected young wife, and several others. Scott is alone onstage throughout. That stage can feel very crowded. The New York Times critic Jesse Green described Scott, in performance, as a 'human Swiss Army knife.' Mindful of Scott's work in 'Fleabag,' 'Ripley' and the recent film 'All of Us Strangers,' Green also referred to Scott as a 'sadness machine.' This is a popular opinion. Variety has called him 'Hollywood's new prince of heartache.' On this morning, Scott, 48, did not appear unusually sad, though he was somewhat rumpled. The plan had been to walk over to Little Island and then along the Hudson River, toward the theater, but severe weather had changed that. 'Oh my God, it's windy,' he said, out on the street. ('You can't get sick,' his publicist fretted.) So Scott had retreated, with a breakfast burrito and a Day-Glo orange juice, to the shelter of a nearby pier. Its windows looked out onto the river. The water — choppy, gray-green — reflected in his eyes. In person, Scott is serious, though he wears that seriousness lightly. And if his intelligence and empathy are obvious, he wears these lightly, too. Vanity eludes him. (Even aware he would be photographed, he arrives with his hair looking like it has never known a comb.) And I thought, as he sat cross-legged on a bench, wearing a nubby brown cardigan, that I have rarely met an actor with less pretense or affectation. Later he took off that cardigan. On his red shirt, a heart was embroidered, just over the breast. Scott did not plan to play all the roles in 'Vanya.' Despite moving the action to Ireland, Stephens, a playwright with whom Scott has often collaborated, had written a more traditional adaptation of the play. But during an early read through with Stephens and the director, Sam Yates, Scott had a scene in which he took both parts. Something electric happened. Initially, despite that electricity, Scott resisted. He worried that playing all the roles would feel like a gimmick or perhaps an empty exercise. But as he got to know the play better, he began to see the connections among the characters. 'They're all just talking about their own very particular pain and how it's a very singular thing,' he said. 'Actually, all of them are much more similar to each other than they say.' Having a single actor onstage, erasing the physical difference between the characters, would only emphasize this. Rehearsals were rigorous, but also magical in their way. Learning the lines was hard — 'so [expletive] hard,' Scott said, but then again he had played Hamlet, so he could handle it. He didn't want to do elaborate accents, though close listeners, and Irish listeners in particular, will distinguish differences of class and locale among the characters. And costume changes (Scott wears his own clothes throughout) were nixed. So he contented himself with finding gestures and small props to define each person. Michael, a country doctor, bounces a tennis ball; Ivan, the Vanya of the title, wears sunglasses and toys with a sound-effects machine; Sonia, Ivan's niece, wrings a dishrag. As the play goes on, these props and gestures fall away and it's only Scott's energy that defines the roles. 'You don't want the audience going: Which one is this?' he said. 'But you do want them to do a little bit of work, a little bit of leaning forward.' Somehow it all succeeds. Even in scenes in which Scott has to canoodle with himself, there is clarity. And surprising heat. (If you are one of the legions of fans obsessed with Scott's Hot Priest character on the TV comedy 'Fleabag,' maybe it's not so surprising.) 'It's representing sex in a very fundamental way,' he said. In every scene, Scott is incredibly specific in where he looks, how he stands, where he places the other characters. Sometimes, alone onstage, he has to adjust his step so that he won't run into them. 'It's just an endless experiment,' he said. 'I'm still learning about it all the time.' Scott doesn't think he's any more sad than most people, though he knows that he often plays sad characters, the 'Vanya' ones among them. (He also, worryingly, has a line ('Ripley,' 'Sherlock') in psychopaths.) He recognizes his talent for empathy and he knows that he is perhaps better at understanding and conveying emotion than most. 'But not just sadness,' he said. 'I laugh very easily. The idea that people are sensitive or vulnerable in some ways, I find very, very beautiful. So I don't have fear of that. Or at least I don't have a big fear.' And really, what's more universal than sadness? 'Who isn't sad?' he said. 'Like, who isn't sad? I don't get that.' 'Vanya,' on its face, is a play about wasted potential. So it's the gentlest kind of irony that in performing it, Scott isn't wasting his. Sometimes that prospect is daunting. 'It's a potentially scary thing to think that you might live up to your potential every time you do the play,' he said. Often he wakes up in the morning and thinks he won't be able to do it again that night. But then he does, making himself a vessel for humanity, in all its multitudes and contradictions. As an actor, he's just large enough to contain it all. 'The fact that we all behave in absolutely monstrous, beautiful, completely contradictory ways as human beings, that's what my job is to represent,' he said.
New York Times
12-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
I'll Have the Psychedelic Dystopia With Everything on It
The most shocking dystopian speculation is not clairvoyant or even extrapolative; it's simply attentive — it discerns what's right here, right now. It's a matter of recognition. The evil Day-Glo clown staring at you through your bedroom window in the middle of the night is simply a reflection of you staring out at the emptiness that's been there all along. The dystopia situated in Three Rivers, Texas, in Fernando A. Flores's marvelous new novel, 'Brother Brontë,' is a recognizable, if hyperbolic (and not by much), facsimile of today's flagrant realities. There is venomous xenophobia and scapegoating, along with the complete disintegration of consensus about objective reality. Many days pass in darkness, the sun and moon and stars blocked out by volcanic smoke and toxic ash, a pall sometimes red, orange or yellow. Water is rationed. People buy homemade toilet paper from peddlers on the street using the tabs from aluminum cans as currency. There's no internet, no television or radio. Wandering immigrants seeking asylum sleep packed in the tail of a crashed jetliner. A war of attrition is waged against single working mothers, who are required by law to indenture themselves to the Big Tex Fish Cannery. (Young men flee to work on Arctic oil derricks.) And perhaps most bleakly dystopian (and integral to the story): The possession of books is illegal. In their indefatigable resourcefulness, people fabricate their own media to clandestinely convey text, like the 'halceamadon,' a complexly folded piece of parchment paper containing a microscript written backward. At the crux of it all is a cohort of intractable women who resist the prevailing regime and struggle to live authentic, exuberant lives in the face of tyrannical repression and widespread deprivation. There in the novel's nucleus, as if radiantly enthroned at the center of a mandala, there amid this draconian book ban enforced by heavily armed ransacking chupacabras (the authorities are named after a cryptid that drinks the blood of goats) who burst into tenements in the middle of the night in search of books to shred, is Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the cohort's most beloved contraband author, her latest opus entitled 'Brother Brontë.' Grim prognoses aside, Flores's novel is an absolute blast to read. Its madcap, carnivalesque backdrop is rendered in psychedelic polychromatics: onyx smokestacks, bright green warehouse walls, purple smog, yellow clouds. And it reeks. Of botanical perfumes, of animal sweat, of grilling onions and wurst, rotting fish, gasoline, blood, agua fresca, tamales, gorditas and powdered doughnuts. Style is everything. (By 'style' I mean the unique way one maneuvers oneself through the world, one's singular manner of being.) Without it we are nothing but a gelatinous mass of faceless, click-baited consumers. This is what Pasolini railed against so indignantly: the fact that neocapitalist globalization and technology were effacing the style of his beloved ragazzi di vita, his lumpen street hustlers. Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time here, with all the lordly de haut en bas of an autodidact. Ontological instability is rampant — objects are alive, endlessly mutable, autonomous, yet subject to all manner of magic spells, incantations and mantras. Every shower curtain and paper clip is shot through with animistic sovereignty and panpsychism. 'Brother Brontë' is like that mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it. There are tangential joy rides into Jazzmin Monelle's other novels, such as 'I Was a Teenage Brain Parasite' (one of the great wish-I'd-come-up-with-that titles) and 'Ghosts in the Zapotec Sphericals' (which features a Borges-like protagonist, the blind director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires, who, using a red rose and a mirror, saves a distant dying planet, Zapotec, from destruction). There's a play called 'Great Headwounds in Underground Art Movements.' There's a magical tiger straight outta Bollywood. There are Shakespearean identity switches, assassinations and black markets for every conceivable item (since no consumer goods seem readily available anymore). This is not a book for the abstemious reader. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of sumptuous language to gorge on. The prose can be volatile, gloriously anarchic, levitating off the page: That a book can be so oneiric and phantasmagorical and so deeply dialectical at the same time I find pretty amazing. It's Bosch meets Brecht. Flores is not what one would call a polemical writer. But he seems to ask: Can one be so naïve right now as to maintain our inalienable right to poetry (and to live poetically)? And isn't there something insurrectionary about that naïveté? There's an eschatological yearning to 'Brother Brontë,' as if losing this world might be our only hope for some last intimacy with it. Of course, the criminalization of book possession, the notion of reading as taboo, as transgression, would make almost any text that much more titillating. But I must say, from my subterranean lair, hidden from the drones of the chupacabras, that I haven't read a novel so rambunctiously lyrical and as gloriously evangelical about literature in a long time. Bravo to Brother Brontë himself, Fernando A. Flores.
