Mariah Carey means Christmas to some of us, and much more to many others.

NY TIMES

If the forces of commerce haven’t completely secularized Christmas, Mariah Carey seems ready to finish the job. I, at least, can imagine a Nativity scenario in which the wise men reach Bethlehem and find Ms. Carey’s face glowing in the manger. Right now her 21-year-old Yuletide jam “All I Want for Christmas Is You” stands atop Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart, where it’s been, on and off (but mostly on), since the chart appeared in 2011.

No matter what is happening in her career — the tribulations, the tours, the headline-grabbing performance mishaps — “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2019.

There are, of course, plenty of die-hard fans for whom Ms. Carey is not merely an end-of-year highlight but a singer-songwriter for all seasons. Ms. Carey’s devoted followers take her artistry very seriously. Sometimes they demand others do, too — it was the fan-organized hashtag #JusticeForGlitter that, in November, briefly catapulted the soundtrack to the notorious 2001 flop “Glitter” to No. 1 on the iTunes Top Albums chart a mere 17 years late.

                                           All I Want for Christmas is You

WIKIPEDIA;

It’s easy to rhapsodize about Ms. Carey’s most recognizable musical trait, that honey-coated voice, capable of contours that previously did not seem humanly possible. She is noted for her five-octave vocal range, power, melismatic style, and signature use of the whistle register. She rose to fame in 1990 after signing to Columbia Records and releasing her eponymous debut album, which topped the US Billboard 200 for 11 consecutive weeks. Soon after, Carey became the first and only artist to have their first five singles reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, from "Vision of Love" to "Emotions".

Following her marriage to Sony Music head Tommy Mottola, Carey became the label's highest-selling act with the follow-up albums Music Box (1993), Merry Christmas (1994), and Daydream (1995). These albums spawned some of Carey's most successful singles, including "Hero", "Without You", "All I Want for Christmas Is You", and "One Sweet Day"; the latter became the longest-running U.S. number-one single in history, with a total of 16 weeks. After separating from Mottola, Carey adopted a new image and incorporated more elements of hip hop into her music with the release of Butterfly (1997). Billboard named her the most successful artist of the 1990s in the United States, while the World Music Awards honored her as the world's best-selling recording artist of the 1990s.

After a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to the top of music charts with The Emancipation of Mimi (2005). It became the world's second best-selling album of 2005 and produced "We Belong Together". With the release of "Touch My Body" (2008), Carey gained her 18th number-one single in the United States, more than any other solo artist.

Throughout her career, Carey has sold more than 200 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), she is the third-best-selling female artist in the United States, with 63.5 million certified albums. In 2012, she was ranked second on VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Women in Music. Aside from her commercial accomplishments, Carey has won 5 Grammy Awards, 19 World Music Awards, 10 American Music Awards, and 14 Billboard Music Awards,[4] and has been consistently credited with inspiring generations of singers.

                                           One Sweet Day

In July 2001, it was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown.She had left messages on her website that complained of being overworked,[109] and her three-year relationship with the singer Luis Miguel ended. On July 26, she was suddenly hospitalized, citing "extreme exhaustion" and a "physical and emotional breakdown.

Love is the subject of the majority of Carey's lyrics, although she has written about themes such as racism, social alienation, death, world hunger, and spirituality. She has said that much of her work is partly autobiographical, but Time magazine wrote: "If only Mariah Carey's music had the drama of her life. Her songs are often sugary and artificial—NutraSweet soul. But her life has passion and conflict."He commented that as her albums progressed, so too her songwriting and music blossomed into more mature and meaningful material.

Several critics have described her as a Coloratura soprano. The singer claims that she has nodules in her vocal cords since childhood, due to which she can sing in a higher register than others. However, tiredness and sleep deprivation can affect her vocals due to the nodules, and Carey explained that she went through a lot of practice to maintain a balance during singing.

Jon Pareles of The New York Times described Carey's lower register as a "rich, husky alto" that extends to "dog-whistle high notes." Carey was heavily influenced by Minnie Riperton, and began experimenting with the whistle register due to her original practice of the range.[296] Additionally, towards the late 1990s, Carey began incorporating breathy vocals into her material.[322] Tim Levell from the BBC News described her vocals as "sultry close-to-the-mic breathiness,"[322]while USA Today's Elysa Gardner wrote "it's impossible to deny the impact her vocal style, a florid blend of breathy riffing and resonant belting, has had on today's young pop and R&B stars."[323]

                                            Hero

Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker adds her timbre possesses various colors, saying, "Carey's sound changes with nearly every line, mutating from a steely tone to a vibrating growl and then to a humid, breathy coo. Her wide vocal range allows Carey to take melodies from alto bottom notes to coloratura soprano upper register."[65]Carey also possesses a "whisper register." In an interview with the singer, Ron Givens of Entertainment Weekly described it this way, "first, a rippling, soulful ooh comes rolling effortlessly from her throat: alto. Then, after a quick breath, she goes for the stratosphere, with a sound that nearly changes the barometric pressure in the room. In one brief swoop, she seems to squeal and roar at the same time."[324]

"For better or worse, Mariah Carey's five-octave range and melismatic style have influenced a generation of pop singers."[325] According to Rolling Stone, "Her mastery of melisma, the fluttering strings of notes that decorate songs like "Vision of Love", inspired the entire American Idol vocal school, for better or worse, and virtually every other female R&B singer since the Nineties."[326] New York Magazine's editor Roger Deckker said that in regarding Carey as an influential artist in music, he commented that "Whitney Houston may have introduced melisma (the vocally acrobatic style of lending a word an extra syllable or twenty) to the charts, but it was Mariah—with her jaw-dropping range—who made it into America's default sound." Jody Rosen of Slate wrote of Carey's influence in modern music, calling her the most influential vocal stylist of the last two decades, the person who made rococo melismatic singing.[327] Rosen further exemplified Carey's influence by drawing parallel with American Idol, which to her, "often played out as a clash of melisma-mad Mariah wannabes. According to Stevie Wonder: "When people talk about the great influential singers, they talk about Aretha, Whitney and Mariah. That's a testament to her talent. Her range is that amazing.

Writer David Browne of The New York Times has commented, "Beginning two decades ago, melisma overtook pop in a way it hadn't before. Mariah Carey's debut hit from 1990, "Vision of Love", followed two years later by Whitney Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You", set the bar insanely high for notes stretched louder, longer and knottier than most pop fans had ever heard." Browne further added "A subsequent generation of singers, including Christine Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé, built their careers around melisma. Carey is also credited for introducing R&B and hip hop into mainstream pop culture, and for popularizing rap as a featuring act through her post-1995 songs.

Ms. Carey on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.CreditJeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty Images

Few other divas of virtuosic voice and glamorous affect have been so involved in the writing of their own music — a point that Ms. Carey has made many times herself since releasing her self-titled debut in 1990. She has been credited for writing or co-writing every original song she has sung, which together represent an idiosyncratic contemporary R&B catalog. Her vast body of work covers virtually every thinkable micro-facet of love’s trajectory, from preliminary crushes to euphoric beginnings to sexual bliss to the despondency of finality. And then there is her consistent theme of the importance of prevailing — the songs about making it through the rain, of learning that a hero lies in you.

“The artist is living the lyric,” said Mr. Fletcher, referencing the aspects of Ms. Carey’s biography — her biracial identity, fraught upbringing, high-profile couplings and splits, and unhappy marriage to Tommy Mottola.

Her spare and subdued 15th full-length studio album, “Caution,” received some of the most ecstatic raves of her career upon its November release. But her newfound status as a critic’s darling hasn’t translated into record sales — “Caution” yielded no hits on the Billboard Hot 100. In the album’s third week on the Billboard 200, it was down to No. 163.

Often, it seems Ms. Carey’s flubs are more scrutinized in the press than her music. Two narratives about her have dominated coverage in recent years. One is that she’s losing her voice, or has lost it, or is hiding the loss of it. The other is that she’s a hot mess.

For instance, the opening night of “The Butterfly Returns” lasted for almost two hours and spanned 25 years of material. Over her live band, the singer’s voice fluttered like her butterfly mascot. She growled with a tenacity that would put her Jack Russell terrier to shame.

But only a few seconds of the show were reported in the press, and those were gaffes. One occurred when a box she was sitting on tipped over and she reached down to steady herself with the hand she was using to hold her microphone. The music continued uninterrupted, betraying Ms. Carey’s momentary lip-syncing.



Stories that seek to define Ms. Carey by her mistakes, not her gifts, harken back to those about her winded, strained live performance at the 2014 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting (“Remember when Mariah Carey could sing? Most millennials probably can’t,” began Deadspin’s post, which netted almost 4 million clicks), or her sound issues-plagued nonperformance in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2016, or her virtually inert choreography onstage to her hit “Honey” in 2017.

The singer’s vocals have undeniably changed in recent years. Witnessing her miss notes can feel like watching the road give out from Wile E. Coyote as he chases the Roadrunner off a cliff. She has largely attributed whatever difficulties she has performing to her vocal folds in addition to the amount of rest she gets. Said Justin Stoney, the founder and president of the school New York Vocal Coaching. “What it appears to be is she is trying to still sing as though she were 23 years old.”

Ms. Carey also said she had just experienced the “hardest couple of years” she’d gone through. She has weathered a broken-off engagement to the billionaire James Packer, a little-watched, widely mocked reality show on E!, and the end of a close relationship with her manager, Stella Bulochnikov. After working together for nearly three years, Ms. Carey fired Ms. Bulochnikov in the fall of 2017. Ms. Bulochnikov, in turn, filed a lawsuit in April 2018 that listed sexual harassment among its allegations.

Ms. Carey performing during the winter holidays at New York's Beacon Theater in 2016.CreditJeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty Images

During Carey's career, her vocal and musical style, along with her level of success, has been compared to Whitney Houston, who she has also cited as an influence,[297]and Celine Dion. Carey and her peers, according to Garry Mulholland, are "the princesses of wails [...] virtuoso vocalists who blend chart-oriented pop with mature MORtorch song."[298] Author and writer Lucy O'Brien attributed the comeback of Barbra Streisand's "old-fashioned showgirl" to Carey and Dion, and described them and Houston as "groomed, airbrushed and overblown to perfection."[298] Carey's musical transition and use of more revealing clothing during the late 1990s were, in part, initiated to distance herself from this image, and she subsequently said that most of her early work was "schmaltzy MOR."[298]

“In today’s world, it’s kind of cool to hate on Mariah Carey,” said Sam Alvarez, an 18-year-old student in the U.K. who has uploaded to YouTube more than 1,600 thematically organized clip compilations of Ms. Carey in concert and interviews since 2014. “I hope with my videos that a lot of people can be introduced to how much of a great artist she is.”In a review of her Greatest Hits album, Devon Powers of PopMatters writes that "She has influenced countless female vocalists after her. At 32, she is already a living legend—even if she never sings another note."[362] While reviewing a concert of Carey in Sydney, Elise Vout of MTV Australia wrote that "it's not amazing choreography or high production value you're going to see, it's the larger than life personality, unique voice, and legend that is Mariah Carey."[363]

Ms. Carey in Glasgow in 2016.CreditRoss Gilmore/Redferns, via Getty Images

Trump tells Democrats he will shut down the government for YEARS if he doesn't get his Mexican wall as 'contentious' White House talks end in stalemate .


President Trump and congressional leaders failed again on Friday to break a deadlock that has kept the government partially shut down for two weeks, and the president acknowledged he threatened to keep agencies closed for “months or even years.”


Emerging from what they called a “sometimes contentious” meeting at the White House, Democratic leaders said Mr. Trump remained adamant that he would not sign spending bills to reopen the shuttered offices unless Congress approved money for his proposed wall on the southern border.


“We told the president we needed the government open,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters outside the White House. “He resisted. In fact, he said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time, months or even years.”


Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, whose party just assumed control of the House on Thursday following the November midterm elections, said Democrats were also committed to securing the border but want government operations resumed while they negotiate that. “We can do that best when government is open,” she said. “We’ve made that clear to the president.”

In a separate appearance afterward in the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump called the meeting “productive” and said he had invited the congressional leaders to form a working group with his advisers to meet over the weekend to talk about border security needs.

Trump falsely claims Mexico is paying for wall, demands taxpayer money for wall in meeting with Democrats.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, was elected speaker of the House. In her speech, Ms. Pelosi emphasized the significance of presiding over the most diverse group of lawmakers in U.S. history.CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

Trump and Democrats Dig In After Talks to Reopen Government Go Nowhere.

During a contentious meeting, President Trump made his case for a border wall and rejected Democrats’ proposals for reopening the government.

Democrats refused to budge from their offer to devote $1.3 billion to border security, such as enhanced surveillance and fortified fencing, but not a wall.

During the contentious meeting in the Situation Room, Mr. Trump made his case for a wall on the southwestern border and rejected Democrats’ proposals for reopening the government while the two sides ironed out their differences.

“I would look foolish if I did that,” Mr. Trump responded after Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, posed the question to him directly, according to three officials familiar with the meeting who described it on the condition of anonymity. He said that the wall was why he was elected, one of the officials said.

Democrats were equally adamant, according to another official who was present for the discussion. Pressed by Vice President Mike Pence and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the incoming minority leader, they refused to budge from their offer to devote $1.3 billion to border security. The official also insisted on anonymity to describe the private conversation.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after the meeting that he had no intention of putting Democratic bills to reopen the government to a vote if Mr. Trump would not sign them.

“We’re hopeful that, somehow, in the coming days and weeks, we’ll be able to reach an agreement,” Mr. McConnell told reporters at the Capitol, offering an ominous timeline.

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post suggesting three ways out: Grant the president the $1.6 billion for border security that he requested, without wall funding, plus an additional $1 billion for security at ports of entry; approve a bipartisan bill linking wall funding with protection for young immigrants brought illegally to the country as children; or resurrect the 2013 comprehensive immigration overhaul that included huge increases in border security measures, sweeping changes to immigration law and a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.

This was the year Netflix took on the cinema establishment and won

GUARDIAN

The uneasy relationship between the streaming giants and the big-screen devotees

There is no doubt who has the bragging rights in the world of movies in 2018. And that is Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of the all-conquering streaming platform Netflix. Netflix, Netflix, Netflix: the word dominated movie conversations this year like a sneezing fit. Earlier, Netflix found itself cast as the bad guy, the anti-cinema philistine whose product was rejected by the Cannes film festival, under pressure from French cinema chains, and opinion-formers found themselves broadly in agreement, arguing that the big screen was all-important, and that people who consented to watch films on laptops and tablets were despicable, soulless content-zombie freaks. The objectors had forgotten, perhaps, that the first time they watched films was on their humble telly at home, and that was where they learned to love cinema.

But Netflix took its films to the Venice film festival, which snapped them up. There, Netflix gave us the Coen brothers’ bangingly good The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; it gave us Roma, which many people believe to be the best film of the year. And, to put the exquisite seal on its victory over Cannes, Netflix presented its editorial reconstruction of Orson Welles’s “lost” film, The Other Side of the Wind. That’s right: a new film by Orson Welles! Courtesy of Netflix! It doesn’t get more impeccably cinephile than that. Surely Netflix is now the good guy? Not quite. Once these films emerged in the UK in the autumn, cinema exhibitors were furious that Netflix had set up a deal with just one chain to show its flagship Roma. Again, Netflix was cast as the wrecker, suppressing the big-screen identity of its own film. Even Cuarón was tweeting that people should see it in cinemas.

To which we can only say … well, yes, but Cuarón consented to the Netflix deal. Streaming on digital platforms is what Netflix does. This is the commercial decision that Cuarón made. Netflix got his movie wide distribution, provided some cinema showings and festival eligibility. As a critic and filmgoer, I can only say that Roma got a more widespread cinema showing than many superb independent films. It is a fact that nothing will replace the big-screen experience; it is also a fact that many outstanding films are really only accessible on DVD or streaming services, hence the anguish that greeted news that Warner Bros was to discontinue its FilmStruck streaming service for rare, classic and arthouse titles. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Barry Jenkins, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Rian Johnson and Christopher Nolan campaigned for it to be brought back. All in vain, although the Criterion Collection is to launch its own streaming channel next year.

White House, Congressional Democrats See No Deal on Shutdown or Border.

Central American migrants near the United States border in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, last month.CreditGuillermo Arias/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Chances look slim for ending the partial government shutdown any time soon.

Lawmakers are away from Washington for the holidays and have been told they will get 24 hours’ notice before having to return for a vote. And although the Senate is slated to come into session Thursday afternoon, few senators were expected to be around for it.


After a weekend and two holiday days for federal employees, Wednesday was the first regularly scheduled workday affected by the closure of a variety of federal services.


Trump vowed to hold the line on his budget demand, telling reporters during his visit to Iraq on Wednesday that he’ll do “whatever it takes” to get money for border security. He declined to say how much he would accept in a deal to end the shutdown.

“You have to have a wall, you have to have protection,” he said.

Shutdown Takes Effect After Last-Minute Talks Fail to Break Impasse

The federal government shut down hours after the House and the Senate adjourned without a compromise on Trump’s border wall demands.

In a video on Twitter, Trump said “there’s nothing we can do” about the shutdown because “we need the Democrats to give us their votes.”

The capital readied itself for how the fallout would affect nine federal departments and several other agencies, including hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

New Google Campus Accelerates Tech’s March Into New York

NY TIMES

As West Coast companies storm into New York, they are reshaping the city’s neighborhoods and changing its identity from a hub of finance, fashion and media to one increasingly centered on technology.

Google said on Monday that it planned to create a $1 billion campus just south of the West Village. The internet company’s push into one of Manhattan’s most famous neighborhoods positions it to become one of New York’s biggest occupants of office space, allowing it to double its work force in the city to more than 14,000 over the next decade.

Google follows Amazon, which said last month that it planned to open a new office in Queens that will house as many as 25,000 employees. Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and Uber have also embarked on recent New York expansions — much of it driven by a hunt for talent. Each is creating hundreds or thousands of high-paying jobs and leasing or building millions of square feet in commercial real estate.

“Law, medicine and finance have been superseded by information technologies,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at New York University who studies the city’s economy.

A tailspin’: Under siege, Trump propels the government and markets into crisis.


WASHINGTON POST

President Trump began Thursday under siege, listening to howls of indignation from conservatives over his border wall and thrusting the government toward a shutdown. He ended it by announcing the exit of the man U.S. allies see as the last guardrail against the president’s erratic behavior: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose resignation letter was a scathing rebuke of Trump’s worldview.

At perhaps the most fragile moment of his presidency — and vulnerable to convulsions on the political right — Trump single-handedly propelled the U.S. government into crisis and sent markets tumbling with his gambits this week to salvage signature campaign promises.

The president’s decisions and conduct have led to a fracturing of Trump’s coalition. Hawks condemned his sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. Conservatives called him a “gutless president” and questioned whether he would ever build a wall. Political friends began privately questioning whether Trump needed to be reined in.

After campaigning on shrinking America’s footprint in overseas wars, Trump abruptly declared Wednesday that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, a move Mattis and other advisers counseled against. And officials said Thursday that Trump is preparing to send thousands of troops home from Afghanistan, as well.

The president also issued an ultimatum to Congress to fund construction of his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall, a move poised to result in a government shutdown just before Christmas. Trump and his aides had signaled tacit support for a short-term spending compromise that would avert the shutdown, but the president abruptly changed course after absorbing a deluge of criticism from some of his most high-profile loyalists.

Leon Panetta, who served as defense secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff for Democratic presidents, said, “We’re in a constant state of chaos right now in this country.” He added, “While it may satisfy [Trump’s] need for attention, it’s raising hell with the country.”

Panetta said the resignation of Mattis is a singular moment and that his letter, which underscores how Mattis sees Trump’s approach as misguided, “puts the security of the nation right now at some degree of risk.”

Trump has been isolated in bunker mode in recent weeks as political and personal crises mount, according to interviews with 27 current and former White House officials, Republican lawmakers, and outside advisers to the president, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments.

“There’s going to be an intervention,” one former senior administration official said speculatively. “Jim Mattis just sent a shot across the bow. He’s the most credible member of the administration by five grades of magnitude. He’s the steady, safe set of hands. And this letter is brutal. He quit because of the madness.”

In his resignation letter, Mattis wrote, “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues . . . Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

Although Trump’s relationship with Mattis has been rocky for months, the president spent the first part of Thursday focused on another fraying relationship: with his conservative base.

On Thursday, as criticism over his capitulation on the wall grew louder by the hour, Trump complained to friends and aides that he felt politically shackled. He had no plan but was spoiling for a fight. By midday, the president picked one.

“I’ve made my position very clear: Any measure that funds the government must include border security. Has to,” Trump said Thursday. He added that he had “no choice” but to act.

Trump’s advisers acknowledged that the funding may not be secured in the end but boasted that the spectacle would be remembered favorably by his base voters as proof of his mettle. A wall funding proposal was approved by the House late Thursday but faced uncertain prospects in the Senate.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speak Thursday at the U.S. Capitol. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), habitually careful in his approach to Trump, avoided strong-arming the president in their recent exchanges, knowing that urging him to stand down on the wall funding probably would only embolden him, according to two people familiar with the discussions. At every turn, McConnell confided to Trump that congressional efforts this month — from the passage of the farm bill to bipartisan criminal justice reform — were a string of victories for him, the people said.

Thanks to McConnell’s soothing, there was cautious optimism that the president would eventually sign a funding bill. “McConnell has a lot to do with it, of course. They talk a lot,” Rep. Harold D. Rogers (R-Ky.) said. “It’s smart to save the fight for another day.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — busy this week bidding farewell to Congress after two decades in office — followed McConnell’s playbook, pointing out how Trump would be able to battle for wall funding in the new year, a person close to Ryan said.

Both Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Trump last week that they could not pass a spending bill with $5 billion for wall construction, and McConnell was told by the White House that Trump would sign a short-term bill without it, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

But on Fox News Channel and across conservative media, there was a brewing rebellion. Prominent voices urged Trump to hold firm on his wall money and warned that caving would jeopardize his reelection.

Rush Limbaugh dismissed the compromise bill on his radio program as “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.” Another firebrand, Ann Coulter, published a column titled “Gutless President in Wall-less Country.” Trump even found resistance on the couch of his favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” where reliable Trump-boosting host Brian Kilmeade chided him on the air Thursday.

The president was paying attention. He promptly unfollowed Coulter on Twitter. And he pecked out a series of defensive tweets blaming congressional leaders for not funding the wall, while also assuming a defensive posture. He suggested that a massive wall may not be necessary in its entirety because the border already is “tight” thanks to the work of Border Patrol agents and troops.

“One of the things he’s most vulnerable to is mockery and mockery by his own supporters,” said Mark Krikorian, a leading anti-immigration activist.

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus joined in the rebellion. During House votes on Wednesday evening, caucus chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and other members refused to budge and held court with reporters, railing against the Republican leadership and warning Trump that he was being led astray.

Ryan: Trump won't sign funding proposal

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Dec. 20 President Trump would not sign a funding bill, because it did not address his border security concerns. (Reuters)

At an Oval Office meeting Thursday with Ryan and McCarthy, Trump was calm and did not yell, but was resolute and “dug in on what he wants,” said a Republican official briefed on the discussion.

Trump spent six to seven minutes in the meeting with Ryan and McCarthy talking about “steel slats” and saying that the term was preferable to calling the proposed construction a “wall,” as the president has done for more than three years.

The administration drama comes at an especially perilous juncture for Trump, following his thumping at the polls in November’s midterm elections. Democrats are preparing to take control of the House in January and to use their subpoena power to investigate Trump’s finances and conduct in office, as well as alleged corruption in the administration.

Meanwhile, Republicans, in their last gasp of unified government, are divided. A band of hard-line conservative lawmakers voted against Trump’s prison reform legislation, which passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support and is expected to be signed by the president Friday. And many foreign policy hawks, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump confidant, sharply criticized Trump’s decision Wednesday to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders stops to talk to reporters outside the White House on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Inside the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was in what one Republican close to the White House described as “a tailspin,” acting “totally irrationally” and “flipping out” over criticisms in the media.

Even as aides argued to him that protesting over wall funding could deprive government workers of paychecks over Christmas, Trump warned in private conversations with Republican lawmakers that they all would get “crushed” if they did not get the wall built.

Trump vented to his advisers that signing the short-term spending bill without wall money would make him look weak and make his base voters think he broke a campaign promise. He also complained that he did not have sufficient bargaining leverage with Congress and blamed senior aides for not presenting him with better options.

“He’s legitimately saying, ‘This is ridiculous. Why would I sign this?’ ” said American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, whose wife, Mercedes Schlapp, is a senior White House staffer. “If you’re the outsider, you don’t want to go along with the same old stupid rules. When he does that, he doesn’t look like an outsider.”

Trump urged aides to go on TV on Thursday night and defend the administration after a brutal day. Senior adviser Stephen Miller went on CNN, where he engaged in a long shouting match with anchor Wolf Blitzer. And White House press secretary Sarah Sanders appeared with a Trump favorite, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.

Marc Short, Trump’s former White House legislative affairs director, said Trump “feels he made a promise to voters that he would build the wall. There is a realization that with Congress changing hands, that the challenge of getting funding for the wall only gets larger.”

Trump’s pinballing conduct — veering from a promise of a shutdown to moving toward a deal, then changing his mind — has vexed members of his own party. Many Republican lawmakers said they sense that Trump is adjusting uneasily to the dynamics of a soon-to-be divided government and lashing out to reclaim some of his dominance over the congressional agenda.

The defense secretary’s resignation compounded the concern.

“Having Mattis there gave all of us a great deal more comfort than we have now,” retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said. “Chaos has kind of been the norm, but it seems to have been heightened. Sometimes you think it’s got to settle, and then another thing happens.”

Trump Administration Says Migrants Seeking Asylum Must Wait in Mexico

NY TIMES

The Battle to Stop Family Separation

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

Anniversaries
From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl
Volumes 1 and 2
By Uwe Johnson
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
1,668 pages. New York Review Books. Boxed set, $39.95.

NY TIMES



THE COMPLETE REVIEW


LITERARY HUB

Defense Secretary Mattis resigns and says his views don't 'align' with Trump's, one day after President announced US troop withdrawal from Syria

'General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February, after having served my Administration as Secretary of Defense for the past two years,' the president tweeted. 'During Jim's tenure, tremendous progress has been made, especially with respect to the purchase of new fighting equipment. General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations. A new Secretary of Defense will be named shortly. I greatly thank Jim for his service!'

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose experience and stability were widely seen as a balance to an unpredictable president, resigned Thursday in protest of President Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from Syria and his rejection of international alliances.

Mr. Mattis had repeatedly told friends and aides over recent months that he viewed his responsibility to protect the United States’ 1.3 million active-duty troops as worth the concessions necessary as defense secretary to a mercurial president. But on Thursday, in an extraordinary rebuke of the president, he decided that Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw roughly 2,000 American troops from Syria was a step too far.

Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House with his resignation letter already written, but nonetheless made a last attempt at persuading the president to reverse his decision about Syria, which Mr. Trump announced on Wednesday over the objections of his senior advisers.

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