The Fitness Magazine: Your Presidential Daily Brief: Trump Has Found the Enemy

IMPORTANT

February 18, 2017

President Trump tours the cockpit of a new Boeing 787-10 Friday at the company's South Carolina facilities. Source: Getty

Trump Goes to War Against the Press

It's been the "exact opposite" of chaos. That's President Trump's assessment of Week 4, in which he fired his national security adviser over lying about Russian contacts, failed to attract a replacement and faced new leaks on other associates' pre-election Kremlin communications. On Thursday he blasted the "dishonest" news media and said he had "no deals in Russia." He escalated the attack Friday, tweeting that top media outlets were "the enemy of the American people" while Republican Sen. John McCain ominously warned that America's authoritarian flirtations should be "all too familiar" to Germans.

Sources: NYT, CNN, McClatchy, The Hill

With Trump 2020 Kickoff, the Forever Campaign Is Born

When is it too early to start campaigning? Apparently never, considering the 45th U.S. president is poised to announce his second-term candidacy today - 29 days after taking office - at a rally in Melbourne, Florida. As election seasons have swollen from months to years, Trump, having run a chaotic effort in 2016, is the unlikely midwife of the "permanent campaign," an unofficial construct until now. What's the difference? For starters, he'll get to control his audience, and taxpayers might save on travel costs.

Sources: The Atlantic, TIME

The Far-Out Left Fights ISIS in Syria

"No State/No Caliphate" is their motto. In northern Syria's Rojava region, a Kurdish experiment in anarchist civil society is taking off - and attracting hundreds of leftist internationals. Unlike other factions, Kurdish fighters are non-sectarian and inspired by their imprisoned guerrilla leader - a secular, feminist, anarcho-libertarian former communist. The region's "Rojava Revolution" is the product of a Kurdish movement that's fought bloody battles against ISIS for years. Now, with knowledge of their ideology spreading beyond their borders, more foreign, Noam Chomsky-reading idealists are being asked to take up the struggle.

Sources: Rolling Stone

Angela Merkel May Have Met Her Match

It's Mutti vs. the prodigal son. Seemingly invincible, despite helping precipitate the European refugee crisis, the world's most powerful woman was on track for a third term as Germany's chancellor. But last month, the moribund center-left Social Democrats elevated Martin Schulz, a troubled youth-turned-European Parliament leader, as their candidate, gaining the party vitality it hadn't seen in decades. Now Merkel, the somber pragmatist whose conservative Christian Democratic base is being eroded by a far-right Alternative für Deutschland, is polling even with the optimistic Schulz, with months to go before September elections.

Sources: Der Spiegel

Briefly

Know This: Malaysian authorities have arrested a North Korean in Kim Jong Un's brother's murder. Storms blowing through central and Southern California have killed two people. And U.K.-based consumer products giant Unilever PLC has rebuffed what would have been Britain's largest corporate takeover, a $143 billion offer from U.S.-based Kraft Heinz Co.

Shadows of History: "I fear that much about it would be all-too-familiar to them ... They would be alarmed by an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism." - Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain, anticipating how his German hosts at the Munich Security Conference would view the direction America's new administration is taking.

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INTRIGUING

Israel's New Trend: Orthodox Single Moms

Who says you need a man? In Israel, a growing trend has seen a 60 percent increase in single mothers across the nation between 2000 and 2011. Many have experienced divorce, separation or death, but others, including members of a large Orthodox community, have chosen to procreate alone. One Orthodox feminist leader says that a protracted search for a husband "should not be a reason ... to remain childless," and artificial insemination offers women a chance to realize one of God's commandments even if marriage during fertile years isn't in the cards.

Sources: OZY

The Macedonian Capital of Fake News

They wagged the dog. The town of Veles, population 55,000, became famous immediately after the U.S. presidential election as the base for at least 100 pro-Trump sites generating fake political news. For inhabitants who cribbed and copied alt-right screeds and registered with Google AdSense, the 2016 election was a gold rush of access to thousands of hungry American browser clickers. But now some of the website gurus there, concerned about President Trump's potential effect on the world, are beginning to regret the very real news that seems to have sprung from their handiwork.

Sources: Wired

The Hot Mess That Made Europe Rich

Call it competitive tension. Europe wasn't always the world's richest mass of nations. But emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond, something remarkable happened, according to economics and history professor Joel Mokyr. "Productive competition" spurred by international rivalries stimulated intellectual and technological advances stifled by more unified societies like China's. When Galileo's "heretical" books were banned in Italy, they were smuggled across borders. Inventions from the microscope to steam engines prodded other nations' scientists to new discoveries - leading all the way to the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that put men in space and still reverberates today.

Sources: Aeon, OZY

How Internment Spurred a Generation of Designers

Out of darkness, light. In the little known history of Japanese-American designers, inspiration grew from the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the infamous Executive Order 9066 that followed. For the 119,000 people confined to "relocation centers," the common narrative of discrimination, resourcefulness and revelation entwine with the personal evolution of some of the finest Japanese American designers and their work, from Disney animation to the Corvette Stingray to book covers like The Godfather. Detained out of fear, they were forced to adapt, teaching lessons of dignity and unity that continue to resonate.

Sources: Curbed

Rio Olympic Venues Left to Decay

The podium's empty. Not even six months have passed since the Games, but the iconic rings have been tarnished by derelict stadiums and broken promises, leaving Rio de Janeiro's citizens with a bitter aftertaste. While many Olympics have left mixed legacies involving debt and underuse, Brazil's seems to eclipse previous examples, with numerous vacant structures setting speed records for earning "white elephant" status. Now shuttered, these buildings have become monuments to planning overreach, while private developers - none of whom submitted bids to repurpose the Olympic Park - and local governments struggle to save face.

Sources: New York Times