Hate, hypocrisy, and short memories on display after Kardashian meeting. For years, the push for federal criminal justice reform hasn’t meant much more than a series of high-profile summits and conferences at which the same tireless advocates and impotent politicians talk about the things they have no shot in hell (and often no real intention) of getting done. Enter Kim Kardashian. The reality TV star and fashion mogul sat down with President Donald Trump at the White House yesterday to chat about prison and sentencing reform.
No one I’ve encountered thinks Kardashian can usher in the serious, dramatic types of reform we need. But can she set something in motion? Perhaps. Regardless, and independent of any actual federal policy changes, Kardashian’s high-profile attention to our draconian criminal sentencing policies raises the issue leaps and bounds beyond its previous profile. I can’t imagine a way in which one of the most recognizable women in the world calling for criminal justice reforms—and visiting the president to talk about these things—could be bad for the cause.
But there is a certain (not small) segment of people who would rather dunk on Kardashian or Trump than appreciate any small glimmers of brightness in these murky political times. So a large amount of reaction to Kardashian going to Washington was centered on insulting her intelligence or implying that it is somehow uniquely alarming and dystopian for a Hollywood celebrity to bend a president’s ear.
We have entered peak satire-cum-dystopia.
Incidentally even Kim Kardashian looks more professional and suited to that office than he does. pic.twitter.com/eC4fZIZfjV
CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta had a small conniption fit on live television over the meeting:
Forget about the fact that Kim Kardashian is here at the White House today and what planet that is anything resembling normal because it’s not. She shouldn’t be here talking about prison reform. It’s very nice that she is here but that’s not a serious thing to have happen here at the White House.
But of course recent presidents have met with all sorts of celebrities, sometimes at the White House, to talk about various issues. Indeed, in 2016 Barack Obama hosted a cadre of pop stars including Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys, and Ludacris at the White House to talk about criminal justice reform. (Acosta didn’t seem to have a problem with star-studded efforts back then.)
And the Obama administration’s Title IX expansion and campus sexual assault initiatives were rife with celebrity endorsers. A promotional trailer for the White House’s “It’s On Us” initiative even opens with: “It started with a celebrity spot to gain attention, which led to a pledge, that became a viral badge…” Vice President Joe Biden debuted the video (which features him and Obama along with Jon Hamm, Questlove, Connie Britton, Kerry Washington, Mayim Bialik, and other celebs) alongside Lady Gaga at the Academy Awards.
There’s nothing unique about Trump inviting Kardashian to the White House to talk about an issue, especially when it’s one that a part of his administration has been focused on lately and one where some small changes both are politically possible and could make a tangible positive difference in people’s lives.
If you ever wonder why criminal justice reform is such an uphill battle look at all the folks who claim to give a shit but decided dragging Kim Kardashian was more important than being hopeful she can do something
And hey, Kardashian has proved herself capable of just about anything she decides she wants to accomplish. I’ve learned better than to expect much from any federal justice reform attempts, no matter how briefly high profile. But I do give Kardashian better odds than anyone in Washington or Hollywood who has previously attached themselves to the cause.
“Specifically, Kardashian [was at the White House] pushing for a presidential pardon for a 62-year-old woman convicted of nonviolent drug offenses,” C.J. Ciaramella noted here yesterday:
Kardashian also tweeted out the story of Matthew Charles. Charles was released from federal prison after serving 21 years behind bars for a crack cocaine offense, but two years after he started putting his life back together a federal appeals court ruled he had been set free in error. He has since been returned to prison.
FREE MINDS
American Civil Liberties Union loses lawsuit against D.C. transit system.
Trump signs right-to-try bill. Terminally ill patients in the U.S. will now have access to unproven but potentially lifesaving treatments, thanks to a “right to try” bill that Trump signed on Wednesday. Under the new law, these patients are allowed to try medications and procedures not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“Thousands of terminally ill Americans will finally have hope, and the fighting chance, and I think it’s going to better than a chance, that they will be cured, they will be helped, and be able to be with their families for a long time, or maybe just for a longer time,” said Trump at yesterday’s White House bill signing ceremony.
Among the bill’s sponsors were Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, “a vulnerable Democrat up for reelection” this fall, reports Jesse Hellmann at The Hill. “Despite calling Donnelly a ‘really incredible swamp person’ earlier this month, Trump thanked the senator for his work on the bill.”
The only other Democrat co-sponsoring the bill was West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. “Most Democrats and public health groups oppose the bill,” writes Hellmann, “arguing that it could put patients in danger.”
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• Roseanne reboot reboot?
you guys make me feel like fighting back. I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U.
“It is telling that no mainstream figure anywhere on the political spectrum has come to Barr’s defense, while everyone from Bill O’Reilly to Tomi Lahren have condemned her,” writes Cathy Young at Forward.
• If you see something, say something culture hits human-trafficking panic. Can you guess what happens next?
Usually Reason brings you stories about people who have crossed the lines of legality, the people who help draw those lines, and the people who want to erase them entirely. This month we thought we’d try something a little different. In this issue, we offer how-tos, personal stories, and step-by-step guides for all kinds of activities that can and do happen right at the borders of legally permissible behavior. This month you can learn how to build a gun, live off the grid, hide your bitcoin, make cannabis cocktails, and much more.
We put together this illicit issue for several reasons: to show the practical limits of prohibition, to demonstrate the ways the First Amendment supports and protects your other rights, and because it’s always valuable to stand at the borders of legality and ask whether those lines have been drawn in the right place. Also, it was fun.
As my editor’s note explains, these stories are handily packaged into a removable section in the middle of the print magazine. Those of you reading online might want to consider deleting your browser history once you’re done. Either way, thanks for reading (at your own risk).
Last night, the long-running show The Americans ended its run with a series finale that is drawing rave reviews (no spoilers ahead).
Before the start of the final season, I sat down with the series creator, Joe Weisberg, and its main writer, Joel Fields, to discuss the themes and issues raised by the show, which follows the adventures of married Soviet spies in deep cover in 1980s’ Washington.
Here’s the the video interview, produced by Meredith Bragg, followed after the jump by a full transcript of the conversation with Weisberg and Fields.
A brief snippet:
Gillespie: …how does [a] commitment to an individual rather than an ideology inform the final season?
Weisberg: We ask that question specifically in terms of the characters in our show and their ideologies. But we also like to kind of step back, and just look at it generally, in terms of what marriages are like. The truth is, we’re all spies in our own lives.
We all have our secret inner lives, and even those of us who try to share as much as possible with our spouses have a part of us that we don’t know how to express, or that gets repressed because we’re expressing so much, and there’s a part we have to hold back. So we all struggle with questions of our true identity, our identity with our loved ones, and our public personas. And that just gets magnified a billionfold when you’re a deep-cover spy, because it’s actualized.
So in this final season, that all comes to a head for the characters, who have to deal with it in their careers as spies, challenging their loyalty to their family but also testing it against their loyalty to one another in their marriage, and their loyalty to their country, and their core idealistic beliefs.
Fields: I’ll just add, in a way, this is a profoundly political show, but it’s not political necessarily in the sense of a lot of what we’ve been talking about, about which country is better, or how do the two systems compare. It’s political simply in terms of our perspective. It’s political in the sense that the two main characters, Philip and Elizabeth, are driven by politics. Their motivation in life—not just in work, but their motivation in life—is ideological. They are political beings of a kind that you rarely see.
They’ve come all the way across the world and started this whole family and done everything for political reasons. Their hearts and souls are political. So in the final season, when Gorbachev has now come to power and is starting to change their country in very profound ways, Philip and Elizabeth are going to react to it differently.
And so, imagine how that’s going to impact their marriage. And that’s really what the final season is going to be about.
The interview has been edited for clarity. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. For an audio version, subscribe to the Reason Podcast.
Nick Gillespie: Joe, you were actually in the CIA for a number of years, and you’ve said that the agency, of all things, is what got you started thinking about doing something about your time in the agency. What was going on there?
Joe Weisberg: One of the things that I sort of absorbed when I was there— I didn’t think I was going to ever write about spies, or anything like that, but I still absorbed a lot that came out later. So, I was very, I worked with a lot of people who were married and had families, and like me, were lying to the people around them. And I didn’t have kids, and I wasn’t married at the time, but colleagues of mine had to lie to their kids about what they did—couldn’t tell them they worked at the CIA, until a certain point that was known inside the agency as “the talk.”
When you sat down with your kids—and nobody told you what age to do it or anything like that, you had to determine for yourself when your kids were mature enough to keep it secret. And then you sat down, and you told them what you really did for a living. And if you thought your kids were maybe never mature enough for that, there were even occasionally some people who never told their kids.
But that idea, even when I was there, I thought that was like, pretty intense. And after I’d left the CIA and sort of was no longer a part of that culture, the further away I got, the… In a way… I don’t want to… It’s not just that it seemed odd to me, it started to seem really like the most emotional and dramatic thing. And when I was later going to write a series about spies, it seemed to me that was something that had never been explored, and something that could form almost a perfect dramatic spine for a television series.
Gillespie: And then you upped the ante by taking Russian spies and putting them here, and so they’re hiding from their kids. What was the starting point? Did you have a kind of goal in mind? And then, has that changed as the series has developed over the years?
Weisberg: What happened was, if you remember, a lot of Russian sleeper agents—or “Illegals,” they’re called—were arrested in 2010. And I was working on the science fiction show called Falling Skies, and I got a call from some of the producers of that show, and they said, “Why don’t you develop a series based on this thing that just happened?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, things aren’t really that bad between Russia and America, I’m not sure that’s really a good idea, but let me think about a little bit.”
And I started wandering around the streets a little bit, and after a couple hours, I suddenly thought, “Oh, you just put it back in the Cold War,” and suddenly that’s a really good idea. And you make the KGB spies themselves the heroes, rather than the FBI or anything like that, and that’ll make it a very interesting twist. And you really center it on the marriage, about this couple, and about these things I was talking about, about the family lying to the kids, and suddenly you’ve got a very new, original show.
Gillespie: Setting it in the ’80s is a stroke of genius. You guys are both in your early 50s, so that’s a period that you know extremely well.
Weisberg: Right.
Gillespie: And we didn’t know it at the time—I’m in the same age range—we didn’t know at the time that it was the last decade of the Cold War. But what… I mean, Joel, what, you know, in the ’80s, what were you thinking? Did you care about the Cold War at that point? Or were you more into parachute pants and the band Living Colour, or something like that? And hair product?
Joel Fields: Boy, don’t ask my mom for the photos, but they do not involve parachute pants.
I remember really hoping that we didn’t all blow each other up. And it’s been hard to explain to some of the writers on the show, over the years, that there was a time when we really felt like we were on the verge of thermonuclear armageddon. And The Day After, remember, played a prominent role—
Gillespie: Right.
Fields: —in the show itself. Testament was a big movie at the time.
Gillespie: And The Day After was a TV movie about what happened if there was a kind of exchange of nuclear weapons, and then after that, there was a panel with, what, it was like Elie Wiesel and William F. Buckley, Jr., and people discussing what it would be like.
Fields: That’s right, it was a huge—
Gillespie: And Testament was similar.
Weisberg: Yeah.
Fields: And The Day After was a huge national event. It became part of our show, the family’s experiencing it.
Gillespie: Right.
Fields: I know for both of us, ’cause we’ve talked about it, it was a pivotal thing for us and for the nation. And you ask, “What was it like, to be young at that time, that looming sense of the Cold War as a real threat?” Boy, it was a powerful part of what formed you.
Gillespie: One of the things that’s fantastic about this show is that it is, it’s not by any stretch a booster, you know. It’s not some kind of vapid boosterism of, like, “America, fuck yeah.” But it’s Reagan… I mean, after the ’70s, there was a palpable sense that America was in decline. The Soviets in ’79 invaded Afghanistan, they seemed to be on the march.
Reagan took office and was kind of largely seen as a madman who was capable of discussing limited nuclear war in Europe and whatnot. And his first few months, or year really, in office was kind of a disaster. He got a lot of things done, but the economy was still tanking. But then, very quickly, America was back.
So, you know, what were the tensions on the Soviet side? Obviously, by the end of the decade, everything had gone to hell for them, but what were the ’80s like for Soviet people?
Weisberg: Well, I mean, that was an incredible decade for them. You know, in the early ’80s, up through when Gorbachev came to power in ’80, there was a kind of stasis, and a kind of economic malaise and decline, but I don’t think we were aware of it to that much of a degree. We still felt incredibly threatened by them, as they went through the final years of Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko. We weren’t seeing them as in decline at all, and I think it’s hard to say what their own sense of themselves was.
You know, I think they had to be on some level aware that their economy was continuing to go down, or not do very well, but they were a superpower, and they were aware of it. And they had nuclear weapons, they could challenge the United States. But obviously, something happened, they had some level of awareness, because in 1985, they knew they needed to bring in a younger generation of leader, and not just that, but one who was willing to start embarking on some kind of change.
Gillespie: You went into the CIA because you felt that we were in a kind of twilight struggle and we needed to win, and you saw things in very binary terms. The show certainly doesn’t reflect that kind of moral certitude. What changed?
Weisberg: I had a very black-and-white vision of things. I saw the Soviet Union as an evil empire. I was a Cold Warrior. I loved Ronald Reagan’s views on foreign policy. When he talked about an evil empire, that resonated with me. I thought that’s what it was.
And I started to, particularly after I left the CIA, I started to open up. I think first as a person in general, as a human being I started to open up. And I think that allowed me to open up more politically, and stop seeing… Once I stopped seeing the whole universe in black-and-white terms, I was able to see the world of politics in less black-and-white terms, too.
And then, a couple of things happened at once. One, I was able to go back and revisit all the things I’d seen and studied and learned about the Soviet Union again, and start to see them differently. And then, two, I started to learn new things about the Soviet Union, and see them now with a new open mind. Everything started to look differently.
So instead of seeing this sort of simplistic evil-empire totalitarian society where everybody was repressed and the Communist Party, the government, were just these terrible people and everybody there suffered, I started to see a real society. A real place with real complexity, and many layers of society, with many people who felt many different ways and had many different experiences, just like, really, any large society. Like our society as well. And so, I just started to not have those simplistic views anymore.
Gillespie: It’s a weird irony of kind of 1980s discourse, conservative discourse, certainly, that the American government was always inefficient and kind of stupid, Reagan famously said, “Government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” But then, when we talked about the Soviet Union, it was a well-oiled machine, right?
Fields: Right.
Gillespie: Nothing ever went wrong, and everything happened according to what they planned.
Fields: Yeah.
Gillespie: In the ’80s, certainly in the United States, there was a very clear para— Or, not a parallelism, but, anti-communists were… If you said anything that equated the United States with the Soviets, you were morally bankrupt, you were a relativist, you know, to make any kind of similarities.
The series, though, and one of the things that’s rich about it, is that there’s all of these parallels. You know, obviously, Soviet spies, FBI counterintelligence people. But even the opening of the show begins with kind of scenes from a Soviet childhood and an American childhood. I mean, do you see the systems as kind of morally equal?
Weisberg: That’s a great question.
Fields: Yeah. For me, no. It’s not at all about moral equivalence. It’s about human equivalence. And I think that’s what… I’d be interested to see whether Joe feels the same way, after all these years of working together, ’cause nobody’s ever quite asked that question.
But to me, it’s actually really important not to get, not to confuse human equivalence with moral equivalence. There are better and worse ways for human beings to experience the world, and there are better and worse systems. And we can argue about those, and test those, and see how they function in the world, and there are different kinds of people, but all people are human. And I think that’s what’s been exciting about, to explore in the show.
Everybody who has a family, has a family. Everybody who’s in a marriage struggles with marriage, and it may be in their own individual ways, but there’s a universality to the human experience. Whether or not you’re a deep-cover Soviet agent, or an American counterintelligence officer, those two characters, they should be the most different, but at their core, they’re still human, and exploring that is at the heart of things for us.
Gillespie: Yeah, and I mean, I think this is something that, now that the ’80s and the Cold War are past a little bit, we can actually explore that, rather than worrying that we’re getting a little bit too soft on communism. To go to your point, Joel, of, there are better and worse ways. And I’m sure we all agree that, broadly speaking, the American way was superior, because one of the reasons is, it allowed people to become more human, or to kind of express their humanity more than a more rigid Soviet system. But part of what the show seems to be about is that Philip and some of the other characters on the Soviet side are able to express themselves more freely, in a kind of modern consumer economy.
Weisberg: It’s a very complicated question. You know, there are all sorts of people here who express themselves freely, and all sorts of people who don’t. Certainly, that society put a lot of restrictions on how people express themselves, but there were all kinds of ways that people expressed themselves that we probably didn’t quite understand, or didn’t quite see, that did happen in that society, too.
But probably, what is unquestionable is that the ability to be free and creative in the economic sphere, and in the scientific sphere, things like that, allows a capitalist economy to thrive in ways that their economy didn’t allow.
Gillespie: So, well—
Fields: But I’ll tell you, in terms of getting to a better place for the human condition, the story is still being written, as we all know. We read a really interesting piece of research that people were having more, better sex in East Germany than the next generation did, after the wall fell. And they interviewed some people, and one of the interviews said, “You know, we couldn’t get good jobs. We didn’t have much. But now my daughter has all of these professional opportunities, and she’s a vice president of the company, and she comes home and she’s exhausted. And they have less sex, she and her husband have a worse sex life than I had under the East German jackboot.” So, you know, we’re all still figuring these things out.
Gillespie: Yeah.
Fields: I don’t think, unfortunately, we haven’t reached nirvana yet.
Gillespie: For sure. Do you think, though, I guess in the long run, that the Soviet Union collapse— Did it collapse, ultimately, because it couldn’t produce enough blue jeans and cigarettes for people? Did it collapse because it bankrupted itself, trying to keep up with Reagan defense initiatives? I mean, these are two counternarratives, and it seems…
I mean, the show is certainly not a political treatise in any way. It’s a great drama because it is moving out from individuals and the way they interact. But, you know, why did the Soviet Union collapse, then?
Fields: I mean, you get me started on this, I’ll go for an hour. But I’ll give you the short version: that I don’t think it was about trying to keep up with Reagan’s defense initiatives and the economic pressure from the West. I don’t think there’s any real evidence to support that, although a lot of Americans do think that, and a lot of—
Gillespie: Well, it’s flattering to us, to think that way.
Weisberg: It’s flattering to us, right, and a lot of people want to, in a way, think that we drove that to happen, and that Reagan’s pol— And, by the way, it wasn’t just the defense initiatives. You know, Reagan drove a lot of covert action specifically designed, with the specific plan, to bring down the Soviet Union.
But I don’t see any convincing evidence that any of that really was responsible for it, whereas Gorbachev coming to power and making all these changes, with glasnost and perestroika, to open things up and change the economy, seems fairly… I mean, there’s a clear story you can see taking place there, where society started to open up, people started to talk about all the problems.
It opened up both in Eastern Europe and through all the non-Russian republics for the nationalist sentiments started to open up, and those places just started to break away and break free. And for the economic sphere, as it tried to reform itself, to start to break apart and crumble as it tried to reform itself, instead. And you can just see how that kind of unfolded and the country started to break apart. So.
Fields: Here’s another theory I like. Someone once said that it wasn’t Ronald Reagan and nuclear weapons that brought down the Soviet Union, it was Aaron Spelling and the VCR.
Gillespie: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Fields: And just the fact that Dynasty became available, and those tapes could be shuffled around from house to house. Once you start looking at that, it’s a little harder to support your Soviet lifestyle.
Gillespie: Let’s talk a little bit about the marriage that’s at the center of the show. I mean, one of the things that’s really delightful is that these are spies who are like, “Who’s got the kids tonight? Because I’ve got to go and fuck some guy to get information and then kill him, but Paige has to be at a band practice at a certain time.” Where does that come from, and how do you come up with scenarios for that?
Weisberg: We really asked ourselves a lot of questions about, “If this were really happening, what would it feel like? What problems would they face? Which situations would they be in?” And then just, you know, along with other writers, tried to just run the scenarios. It’s really just what we came up with.
There’s a great, the head KGB archivist, a guy named Mitrokhin, stole the entire archives of the KGB and brought them over to the West. So we had a really good resource material that told us about a lot of things that Illegals actually did. So we were able to take certain things, like, for example, the marriage to Martha was built on an actual story of how KGB Illegals did—not often, but a couple of times, very occasionally—did marry women in order to get intelligence.
So we had things like that that we could build on. But we’d take things like that, and say, “Well, what would happen next? What would happen next?” And made that stuff up. But it felt real to us.
Gillespie: Did, you know, on some level, the kind of long-term… I don’t want to say it’s a plot arc, it’s kind of a moral arc of the show, and this gets to some of the points you were making. It’s really about the individuals being committed to one another, rather than ideological promises. How does that inform the final season of the show?
I don’t think this is giving anything away to say that, at the opening of the season, Philip is kind of done with spy work. His wife is not. There are also larger complications that come from Gorbachev and Reagan actually getting together to talk about limiting nuclear weapons and whatnot.
But how does that commitment to an individual rather than an ideology inform the final season?
Weisberg: We ask that question specifically in terms of the characters in our show and their ideologies. But we also like to kind of step back, and just look at it generally, in terms of what marriages are like. The truth is, we’re all spies in our own lives.
We all have our secret inner lives, and even those of us who try to share as much as possible with our spouses have a part of us that we don’t know how to express, or that gets repressed because we’re expressing so much, and there’s a part we have to hold back. So we all struggle with questions of our true identity, our identity with our loved ones, and our public personas. And that just gets magnified a billionfold when you’re a deep-cover spy, because it’s actualized.
So in this final season, that all comes to a head for the characters, who have to deal with it in their careers as spies, challenging their loyalty to their family but also testing it against their loyalty to one another in their marriage, and their loyalty to their country, and their core idealistic beliefs.
Fields: I’ll just add, in a way, this is a profoundly political show, but it’s not political necessarily in the sense of a lot of what we’ve been talking about, about which country is better, or how do the two systems compare. It’s political simply in terms of our perspective. It’s political in the sense that the two main characters, Philip and Elizabeth, are driven by politics. Their motivation in life—not just in work, but their motivation in life—is ideological. They are political beings of a kind that you rarely see.
They’ve come all the way across the world and started this whole family and done everything for political reasons. Their hearts and souls are political. So in the final season, when Gorbachev has now come to power and is starting to change their country in very profound ways, Philip and Elizabeth are going to react to it differently.
And so, imagine how that’s going to impact their marriage. And that’s really what the final season is going to be about.
Gillespie: What do you think explains the appeal of the show? I mean, the show is airing now, at a time when the American economy is kind of messed up. We have a threat from Russia, as well as communist China. You know, I mean, there’s a lot. We have a madman in the White House, etc. What do you think is appealing about this show? What does it allow us to do that less successful shows don’t?
Fields: When you put it that way, it just puts me into a panic. And I don’t want to watch.
Weisberg: I thought the economy was good, is the economy messed up?
Fields: Apparently, there’s a madman in the White House. We’ve been too busy making the show.
Gillespie: Yeah, yeah.
Fields: Someone get us a paper, or an internet connection.
You know, I think, clearly, there’s all of that, everything that you said. At the end of the day, for us, it’s the human story, and the marriage story, and the family story.
We had a great moment in season one, where we sent one of our rough cuts in, I forget which episode—Philip and Elizabeth had just done something horrible, honeytrap, murder, something terrible. And they had this argument about how it went. And we get a call from the network executive, who gave us his reaction to the episode.
And he said, “You’re going to get a call later with all of our notes, and thoughts, and comments, but I just wanted to tell you: I saw that episode, and I thought, ‘That’s exactly the fight I had with my wife last night.'” And we thought, “OK, now we’re cooking with gas. Because if we can take this crazy spy story and make it about the universals of marriage, then the show just might be able to work.”
Gillespie: We’ve talked about the content of the show, let’s talk about the distribution and the possibilities. This is a show that would not have been possible 15 years ago, 20 years ago. You’re on FX, which is putting out cutting-edge material on basic cable, as opposed to something like HBO. How have you benefited from creative freedom in order to tell these types of stories?
Weisberg: Just start to finish. I mean, what you’re saying, first of all, is, this show wouldn’t have been on the air, really, at any other time. And we were able to go on the air, we were able to stay on the air. You know, at the beginning, there was pretty, not the highest-rated show, at the beginning. And to some degree, it was never the highest-rated show. But really, with just critical acclaim, and then a kind of growing audience, we were able to have a full run of six seasons.
And also just the support from the network, telling us: “Do whatever you want to do. Just make it a great show. Don’t stress out. Don’t worry about the numbers.” And that, it’s hard to even express, as writers, the freedom you get from that. The feeling that instead of sitting there panicking about, “We have to do this this episode, or this this season, to try and draw in more viewers.” All we had to do was try to make it good. And that was, by the way, John Landgraf said that to us. He said, “Don’t worry about anything, just make it good, and then that’s where success will lie.”
Fields: I tell a story about John Landgraf, actually—
Gillespie: And explain who he is.
Fields: John Landgraf is the chairman, guru, head of everything at FX.
Weisberg: That’s his title.
Fields: That’s his title. I’m going to tell you a story about John Landgraf, who’s the head of FX, and something that happened in-between season one and season two. Because you asked what it’s like with all this creative freedom, and we do have a great amount of creative freedom, but I would put it differently. I’d say we have creative support, that support comes with freedom.
And it almost became a joke with us, that all the notes, calls would start and finish with either John, or whoever was giving notes, they would start and finish with them saying, “It’s your show, these are our comments, take them for what you want, but you make the choices you want to make.”
So we had that freedom, but the freedom comes with an incredible dramaturgical support from them. Incredible insight. And they all spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the show from a perspective that we can’t have. They’re really our first audience, and that’s so valuable.
Between seasons one and season two—remember, as you said, we had a wonderful critical response to season one, but not the greatest of ratings—and we had this talk with John Landgraf as we were figuring out where we wanted to go in season two. And he said that he’d given the show a lot of thought. And that means a lot, ’cause John gives everything a lot of thought, but when he says he’s given it a lot of thought, it’s a lot of thought.
And remember, he said, “I’ve tried to think about things you guys could do, or that we could do for the show, that would boost the ratings. But I can’t come up with any ideas that won’t ruin your show, and we don’t want to do that. So let’s just keep making it good.” And that was really liberating.
And so, that’s… Again, it’s not just freedom, it’s support that we had from the network. A lot of insight along the way, from the beginning, really through the final episode. But also the wisdom to let the show be what it wants to be.
Gillespie: Let me ask you, though, because you, more than Joe, have a background in TV, and you’ve been in it for what, 25 years? Something like that?
Fields: Well, my post-CIA cover runs—
Weisberg: Your effort to get out of that question is failing, by the way.
Gillespie: Is it easier—and it’s never easy to make a good show, much less a great show—but do you feel like the medium has really matured in your lifetime? When you go back and look at stuff, you know, I’m thinking of 25 years ago, I was interviewing Alf as an entertainment reporter.
Fields: Right.
Weisberg: Hey, that was a great show.
Gillespie: And that’s not a bad show, but like—
Weisberg: No.
Fields: We like Alf.
Weisberg: That was really funny.
Gillespie: But it’s not as good as what we’ve got now, is it?
Fields: Well, there’s… Look, there’s been a real cycle. First of all, it’s easy to forget all the great shows that came before. I mean, we’re here on the shoulders of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Norman Lear made some of the greatest comedies ever made.
There was great TV. And none of this would be possible without it. That said, gosh, when I think about all the years that I’ve made TV, what cycles I’ve been through. When I started, I started in TV movies, because that was the place you could do really exciting work. That’s where The Day After had been made, and that’s where The Burning Bed had been made. And you could tackle important contemporary issues. You could tackle important dramatic issues. You could do romantic comedy. You could do a thriller.
And I had a great time in that world, and then it slowly kind of changed and I cycled into the TV series world. But I never could imagine that, where the TV series world was headed was this incredible world of drama. When I pivoted to TV series, I hoped to work on good ones, but the really great dramas were being made in feature films.
And today, we’re very lucky. Suddenly, we found ourselves in this place where, when we started making The Americans, we were trying to figure out what the stories were, week-to-week. And by the time we got to the second year, we found ourselves letting go of the week-to-week storytelling and just telling this long story following the drama of these characters. And there was this total liberation that came with where we happened to find ourselves, in the landscape of TV. So, it’s been a pretty great journey.
Gillespie: Do you think that, in a broader sense, the type of show that you’re talking about here, which is this incredibly rich and complex, multilayered story that unfolds over years—is that kind of serial TV playing the role that the novel might have in 19th-century Europe and America? You know, this thick slice of a whole society, in the way that it fits together. And if that’s true, why are we watching now, rather than reading? And what is gained, and what is lost in that transition?
Weisberg: That’s interesting. I mean, this show does feel novelistic, to me at least. Specifically in the sense that it doesn’t feel… It feels leisurely in its pacing, it doesn’t feel like it has to get anywhere. It doesn’t… You know, some novels have cliffhangers, and some don’t, but this one doesn’t feel like it has to. Every season doesn’t have to end in a certain place. It just sort of…
In particular, it’s character-based, and it just goes on telling the lives of these characters, and it could end anywhere. Now by the way, again, all novels aren’t that way, but some certainly are. And this show has always felt that, from the beginning.
But why there’s a move to that, or why that’s becoming such a popular form of storytelling right now, I don’t know. I can only tell you that I’ve found something very interesting for myself, which is: I’ve always been a big reader, and I find myself now going back and forth in phases. I find myself having a heavy TV phase, where I’ll watch a lot of serialized TV, and then I’ll stop watching TV and start reading books again. And then I’ll go back to TV, and back to books. And I can’t figure out what any of it means.
Fields: I think one reason for that may be technological. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t do that. The option wasn’t there, of getting into something and just binging it. You know, I think… It’s actually changed the process for us in a different way. Which is: When we make the show, there’s less of a creative feeling that it has to achieve something in a particularly urgent way that’s going to get everybody to scramble to watch the next episode. But that we can tell the story that feels right to us, and if somebody finds the show in two years, or in five years, or in 10 years, it’s going to be there. And knowing that is very reassuring, and I think it does impact the storytelling a bit.
Fields: A related thing is that we’re not really under pressure to bring the episodes in at a particular length. We can pretty much go as long as we want on any episode, and that is fantastic. That really allows us to just do what we want in episodes, and it’s great.
Gillespie: As a kind of final question, you have created this incredible world. And you know, it’s a world that people can recognize, because we kind of lived in it. But it’s a fictional universe that is, you’ve mapped in incredible detail and nuance and sophistication, and it’s kind of a great place to hang out. It’s true, you know, sometimes, you want to be like, “OK, I’ve got to go step outside and take a deep breath or snort some cocaine and clear my head,” but… What is it like to walk away from it? I mean, at the end of this. It is hard to say, “OK, we’re shutting the door here”?
Weisberg: It’s horrible. We’re like, suffering with that, right now we’re suffering with it. I mean, just yesterday, we watched them filming literally the last scene of the show, except we’re still filming for two more weeks. ‘Cause you know, we don’t shoot the scenes in order. So now, even that is so weird, and so confusing. And in a couple weeks, that world is closing its doors. I’m dying, I…
Fields: Yeah, it’s tough, and emotional. Literally across the street, they’re tearing down our sets right now, as we speak. And it’s been, it’s been such a wonderful and gratifying experience, been a gratifying experience creatively, and personally. And I’m just in denial, that it’s an end. I’m just going to hang onto denial as long as possible, and keep making the show, until it runs out.
Gillespie: So you’ll have nostalgia for making The Americans.
Weisberg: Oh, yes. We will definitely have nostalgia for making Americans. Hey, maybe our next show will be about making The Americans. You think that’s kind of an universal nostalgic thing?
Fields: I’m in.
Weisberg: OK, done.
Gillespie: Well, we’ll leave it there. We’ve been talking with Joel Fields, and Joe Weisberg, the creators, showrunners, of The Americans, whose final season starts at the end of March on FX network. Guys, thanks for talking.
Though competition is great for consumers—as they get more and better goods and services for less money—some companies dislike the constant pressure it creates for them to stay ahead. When that’s the case, it’s no surprise when they call on the government to squash annoying competitors. Case in point: the big three U.S. airlines’ attempts to limit the pressure by Persian Gulf carriers on their price and quality. Apparently, writes Veronique de Rugy, flying the friendly sky is all about U.S. airlines making money on the backs of their captive consumers.
The German government is cracking down on parents who take their children out of school for vacation. Officials are investigating more 20 families caught at airports trying to leave the country recently. The families had pulled their children out of school ahead of a three-day weekend to beat higher fares on peak travel days. But it is illegal in Germany to keep children under 17 out of school.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced a series of changes to Obama-era banking regulations intended to prevent banks from taking unnecessary risks with their clients’ money. The move will free smaller financial institutions from onerous federal rules and allow regulators to focus their attention on bigger banks that take greater risks.
The changes to the so-called Volcker Rule—named for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who suggested the basic premise behind what eventually become a 700-plus page regulation included as part of the Dodd-Frank Act—were quickly criticized for supposedly bringing the entire financial system back to the precipice of 2008.
“This proposal is no minor set of technical tweaks to the Volcker Rule, but an attempt to unravel fundamental elements of the response to the 2008 financial crisis, when banks financed their gambling with taxpayer-insured deposits,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, toldThe New York Times. “If implemented, these proposals could turn the Volcker Rule into a dead letter, a regulation that would not meaningfully restrict trading activities at the banks whose problems could drag down the entire financial system—again.”
The reality is quite different. For starters, that’s because the Volcker Rule isn’t actually being repealed.
In theory, the Volcker rule is supposed to stop banks from engaging in what’s known as “proprietary trading“—using money on the bank’s own balance sheet to engage in speculative trades intended to generate profit for the bank. Typically, financial institutions make money by charging a fee for transactions on behalf of their clients, but proprietary trading allows banks to make direct bets on the market in the same way that individual investors might.
Complicating matters is that fact that banks routinely do invest some of their holdings as a way of protecting against risk in other parts of their portfolios. This hedging is a sound, and important, banking practice. But how do you tell the difference between hedging and risking proprietary trading? As Reason’s Peter Suderman noted in 2012, that question hamstrung much of the debate over the Volcker Rule and the Dodd-Frank Act in general. In the end, the law evolved as the legislation was written and ended up leaving banks with significant leeway to hedge various risks.
But like so much in Dodd-Frank, the Volcker Rule has never been very clear about the distinction between hedging and taking unnecessary risks. No one less significant than the “Frank” in Dodd-Frank slammed the final version of the Volcker Rule when it went into affect for creating an “untenable” situation where banks were being forced to comply with a rule that failed to articulate how to comply with it.
“The results reflected in the proposed rule are far too complex, and the final rules should be simplified significantly,” then-Sen. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told The Hill in July 2012.
That’s exactly what’s finally happening.
“This proposed rule will tailor the Volcker rule’s requirements by focusing the most comprehensive compliance regime on the firms that do the most trading,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a statement. “Firms that do more modest amounts of trading will face fewer requirements.”
Specifically, the changes divide financial institutions into three tiers. As CNBC explains, banks with more than $10 billion in assets—Wells Fargos and Goldman Sachses of the banking world—will still need to comply with the strictest set of rules, while banks with between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets will face “reduced compliance requirements” and those with less than $1 billion will no longer have to demonstrate compliance with the Volcker Rule at all.
That’s in line with a set of Dodd-Frank reforms passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month. That law will exempt banks with less than $250 billion in assets from Dodd-Frank’s so-called “enhanced prudential standards”—strict regulations regarding liquidity, risk management, and capital meant to serve as a “stress test” for banks’ balance sheets. Together, the two actions indicate that the Trump administration is taking a pretty reasonable approach to financial regulation: asking bigger banks to shoulder heavier regulations and preventing those rules from swamping smaller financial institutions. Additionally, the changes will allow federal regulators to focus their enforcement efforts on the banks that could prove to be an actual risk to the economy if they overplay their hands.
Of course, it might be preferable to have fewer financial regulations on all banks. Instead of limiting the types of risk that financial institutions can take, government should simply force banks to face the consequences when those risks fail to pay off. But as long as there is an implicit—or explicit—promise that taxpayers will serve as a backstop to banks considered “too big to fail,” then it probably makes sense to force the banks representing the biggest potential cost to taxpayers to comply with additional rules.
Addressing that moral hazard is essential to correcting the current shape of financial regulations. In the meantime, setting the little guys free from rules that were only ever meant to be aimed at Wall Street’s biggest banks is likely to benefit investors and entrepreneurs by increasing market liquidity and access to credit.
Vanity Fairreported this morning that reality TV superstar Kim Kardashian will meet with White House senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as President Trump himself, to push for prison reform today.
Specifically, Kardashian will be pushing for a presidential pardon for a 62-year-old woman convicted of nonviolent drug offenses:
Kardashian hopes to make a legal argument to President Trump for why he should pardon Alice Johnson, a 62-year-old great-grandmother serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. More than 21 years after Johnson went to prison, Kardashian came across Johnson’s story on Twitter earlier this year and reached out to Ivanka, who connected her to Kushner, according to the source. In an interview earlier this month, Kardashian said that, if given the opportunity, she would “explain to [Trump] that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that we’re not proud of and that we don’t think through all the way.”
You can read more about Johnson’s case in her bio page on CAN-DO Clemency, a group that advocates for clemency for non-violent drug offenders. As her page notes, Johnson’s clemency request was denied by the Obama administration.
Yesterday Kardashian also tweeted out the story of Matthew Charle. Charles was released from federal prison after serving 21 years behind bars for a crack cocaine offense, but two years after he started putting his life back together a federal appeals court ruled he had been set free in error. He has since been returned to prison.
As Reasonreported yesterday, Charles’ story sparked outrage and widespread calls for Trump to commute his sentence.
While the Trump administration is staunchly opposed to sentencing reforms, it has supported more modest prison and reentry reforms. Earlier this month, the White House held a prison reform summit where Trump called on Congress to pass a pending prison reform bill and get it to his desk. He also spoke in his State of the Union speech earlier this year about the need to give former inmates better training and opportunities for a second chance at life.
Trump has proved receptive to other celebrity entreaties, such as one from Sylvester Stallone that resulted in Trump’s recent posthumous pardon of boxer Jack Johnson. Listen, it’s a not great state of affairs when you need a massive celebrity to get the attention of the president and fix gross injustices, but if Kim K. can get it done, more power to her.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
During the 1980 presidential campaign John McClaughry served as one of Ronald Reagan’s three principal speechwriters. In late October 1980, he was assigned to draft Reagan’s election eve national television speech. The idea—initially—was to summarize the main points of his campaign for the presidency, and to illustrate how his thinking on public issues would serve the American people.
Before McClaughry could produce a third draft, there was a new development. According to three-day running polls, Reagan was leading President Jimmy Carter by 10 points nationally and his support was trending upwards. So the campaign high command decided—rightly—to not have Reagan give an election eve address.
“Reagan’s Lost Speech” was never cleared for delivery, or even (so far as we know) shown to Reagan. But it encapsulated ideas that made Reagan so appealing to so many, most importantly the notion that “the overriding question is not one of Left or Right. It is one of reversing the flow of power and control to ever more remote institutions.”
In the speech, which unfortunatley bore little ressemblence to his presidency once it was underway, Reagan would offer his dream as president to “capture a vision of America—strong, vital, productive—where the affliction of giantism began to give way before a resurgence of individual liberty, of strong families, of the human-scale institutions that give meaning to our existence, of a new faith in American’s future.”
Read the whole thing for the first time exclusively here at Reason.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) would impose a nationwide limit of three days on initial prescriptions of opioids for acute pain. “People are dying around the country every single day because patients are being prescribed too many opioid pills at one time,” Portman’s spokesman tellsThe Daily Beast‘s Jackie Kucinich. “A three-day limit is common sense, based on CDC guidelines, and Senator Portman is going to stand up and fight for what is right.”
In reality, Portman is fighting for what is wrong, both factually and morally, because a three-day limit is not common sense, it is not based on CDC guidelines, and it is not sound medicine. As Jeffrey Singer notes on the Cato Institute’s blog, the American Medical Association for once is taking the right position on federal meddling with health care by opposing Portman’s bill. In a statement quoted by Kucinich, the doctors’ organization says:
A strict three-day limit ignores the admonition from the CDC guideline that “Clinical decision making should be based on a relationship between the clinician and patient, and an understanding of the patient’s clinical situation, functioning, and life context,” misstates the actual recommendation of the CDC, and applies limits to clinical situations to which they were not intended to be applied. Limits and one-size-fits-all approaches will not end this epidemic.
Here is what the CDC’s guidelines say about opioid prescriptions for acute pain:
When opioids are used for acute pain, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dose of immediate-release opioids and should prescribe no greater quantity than needed for the expected duration of pain severe enough to require opioids. Three days or less will often be sufficient; more than seven days will rarely be needed.
Contrary to what Portman seems to think, that is not an endorsement of a mandatory three-day limit. In fact, saying that three or fewer days “will often be sufficient” implies that longer prescriptions usually are necessary.
Even if Portman correctly understood the CDC’s advice, he would be mistaken to think it is supposed to be a hard-and-fast rule, let alone a rule enforced under the threat of taking away a physician’s prescription privileges, as Portman’s bill would do. As the AMA notes, the CDC emphasizes that care should be tailored to each patient:
Clinical decision making should be based on a relationship between the clinician and patient, and an understanding of the patient’s clinical situation, functioning, and life context. The recommendations in the guideline are voluntary, rather than prescriptive standards. They are based on emerging evidence, including observational studies or randomized clinical trials with notable limitations. Clinicians should consider the circumstances and unique needs of each patient when providing care.
The CDC’s guidelines nevertheless have been widely misinterpreted as calling for strict limits, especially on daily doses, which has led to serious problems for people suffering from severe chronic pain. “When health care providers read and interpret these guidelines, they understand them to be informational, nonbinding, and inconclusive,” writes Singer, a Phoenix surgeon, Cato senior fellow, and Reason contributor. “But that’s not how politicians ‘do science.'”
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that many health care providers have joined politicians in misinterpreting the CDC guidelines. Otherwise chronic pain patients who have been doing well on opioids for years would not suddenly find their doses arbitrarily slashed, leaving them bedridden and in some cases suicidal. The CDC itself bears a lot of responsibility for those outcomes because the dose numbers it settled on do not have a firm scientific basis but are implicitly presented as the outer limits of sound medicine.
When it comes to acute pain treatment, however, Portman is clearly misreading what the CDC said, and he is far from alone in doing so. Since the guidelines were published in March 2016, legislators in 18 states have limited the length of initial opioid prescriptions for acute pain, according to a tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Seven days is the most common limit. Only two states, Florida and Kentucky, have imposed a statutory three-day limit for adult patients. Kentucky makes exceptions for major surgery or trauma, while Florida allows seven-day prescriptions “if medically necessary based on provider professional judgment.” Portman’s bill has no such exceptions.
Even seven days will be too short for many postsurgical patients, which could lead to more refills and paradoxically increase the number of pills dispensed. A three-day limit with no exceptions is clearly extreme and medically unjustified. Yet The Daily Beast‘s Kucinich portrays the AMA’s opposition as nothing but self-interested special pleading. She quotes one senator’s complaint that his colleagues are “too scared to take on the AMA,” notes the group’s spending on lobbying, and says “the AMA opposition to proposals like limiting prescriptions…to three-day supplies” has “confused and infuriated advocates.” The problem, I think, is that they were already confused.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official accounting, 65 people in Puerto Rico died as a result of Hurricane Maria. The agency does note that “hundreds of additional indirect deaths in Puerto Rico may eventually be attributed to Maria’s aftermath pending the results of an official government review.”
“Hundreds” may be an understatement. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates the number of such indirect deaths at 4,645 people—more than 70 times higher than the official figure. This is a 62 percent increase in the mortality rate compared with the same period in 2016. It should be no surprise that the death rate for our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico rose after Hurricane Maria blocked most roads and knocked out power, cellular phone service, and potable water supplies for weeks at a time.
The Harvard-based researchers made this calculation based on a randomized survey of 3,299 households asking respondents if anyone they knew had died between September 20 and December 31, 2017. They also asked how they died and whether their deaths could be attributed to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Using a survey similar to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) death scene investigation form for post-hurricane deaths, they identified 38 deaths among those households, of which 12 died of causes unrelated to the hurricane. The householders attributed the deaths of 12 people to the interruption of necessary medical services and 3 from medical complications stemming from an injury, trauma, or illness directly due to the hurricane. From there they extrapolated the mortality rate to Puerto Rico’s 1,135,000 households.
The full death count may be even worse: The study adds that the estimate “is likely to be an underestimate because of survivor bias.”
Counting and attributing deaths that result indirectly from natural disasters is a fraught enterprise. For example, NOAA’s initial 2005 report on Hurricane Katrina noted that “the total number of fatalities known, as of this writing, to be either directly or indirectly related to Katrina is 1833.” The agency has since lowered its estimate of deaths attributed to Katrina to 1,200 people.
A 2007 study using data from death notices published in the Times-Picayune before and after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in August 2005, however, calculated that the mortality rate for the region rose by 47 percent between January and June of 2006. The researchers found that the monthly rate of death notices in the Times-Picayune averaged 924 per month in 2002–2004, but rose to 1,317 per month between in the first half of 2006. Roughly calculated, that means that there were 2,358 excess deaths in the period after Katrina.
While Puerto Rican public health authorities have acknowledged that 472 more people died in September after Hurricane Maria compared with the same month in the previous year, they did not officially attribute most of those deaths to the effects of the storm. Given the controversy over post-Maria mortality statistics, the Puerto Rican government in February asked researchers at George Washington University to conduct a study to estimate the excess mortality tied to the hurricane.
These researchers are tasked with reviewing and analyzing existing records and death certificates and then estimating the excess mortality from the time the storm hit on September 20 through the end of February 2018. They will also evaluate the current CDC guidelines for identifying mortality during such a disaster and how well Puerto Rican public health officials followed those procedures. Their preliminary report is due in the next month or so.
In a sense, there is no such thing as a natural disaster. There are natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, but disasters result from policies adopted and other choices made prior to and after a hazard strikes. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, badly engineered and maintained levees led to the inundation of New Orleans and the deaths of hundreds of people. Hurricane Maria destroyed a decayed electric power grid and badly neglected roads, bridges, and water supply systems made fragile by years of massive fiscal irresponsibility.
Hopefully, having a clearer idea of how many people died at Maria’s hands will help the public determine how to prevent the next storm from becoming a humanitarian disaster.
Hate, hypocrisy, and short memories on display after Kardashian meeting. For years, the push for federal criminal justice reform hasn’t meant much more than a series of high-profile summits and conferences at which the same tireless advocates and impotent politicians talk about the things they have no shot in hell (and often no real intention) of getting done. Enter Kim Kardashian. The reality TV star and fashion mogul sat down with President Donald Trump at the White House yesterday to chat about prison and sentencing reform.
Usually Reason brings you stories about people who have crossed the lines of legality, the people who help draw those lines, and the people who want to erase them entirely. This month we thought we’d try something a little different. In this issue, we offer how-tos, personal stories, and step-by-step guides for all kinds of activities that can and do happen right at the borders of legally permissible behavior. This month you can learn how to build a gun, live off the grid, hide your bitcoin, make cannabis cocktails, and much more.
Last night, the long-running show The Americans ended its run with a series finale that is 
Though competition is great for consumers—as they get more and better goods and services for less money—some companies dislike the constant pressure it creates for them to stay ahead. When that’s the case, it’s no surprise when they call on the government to squash annoying competitors. Case in point: the big three U.S. airlines’ attempts to limit the pressure by Persian Gulf carriers on their price and quality. Apparently, writes Veronique de Rugy, flying the friendly sky is all about U.S. airlines making money on the backs of their captive consumers.
The German government is cracking down on parents who 
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced a series of changes to Obama-era banking regulations intended to prevent banks from taking unnecessary risks with their clients’ money. The move will free smaller financial institutions from onerous federal rules and allow regulators to focus their attention on bigger banks that take greater risks.
Vanity Fair 
During the 1980 presidential campaign John McClaughry served as one of Ronald Reagan’s three principal speechwriters. In late October 1980, he was assigned to draft Reagan’s election eve national television speech. The idea—initially—was to summarize the main points of his campaign for the presidency, and to illustrate how his thinking on public issues would serve the American people.
A 
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s