11 APRIL

Raid rage

FBI raids on the office, home and hotel room of President Trump's attorney Michael Cohen have brought Special Counsel Robert Mueller closer to the White House than ever before. Mueller is reported to have referred the investigation of Cohen to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York – a Trump appointee. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was also handpicked by Trump, personally signed off on the raid.

The Washington Post reports that federal prosecutors investigating Cohen are seeking records related to two women who received payments in 2016 after alleging affairs with Trump years before. Cohen was also named deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee a year ago.

Trump called the investigation "an attack on our nation" and when asked if he was considering firing Mueller on Monday, he responded: “I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. Many people have said, ‘You should fire him.’” Senate Republican leaders have sharply warned Trump not to fire Mueller. Earlier Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Sanders said publicly that Trump believes he has the power to do so.

Amidst the latest scandal, the president has cancelled a planned trip to Latin America on Friday, citing the current crisis in Syria.

NEWS WRAP

South Pacific power play 

• China has reportedly approached Vanuatu about building a permanent military presence in the South Pacific. Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald, visiting scholar and senior fellow Charles Edel said this would change Australia’s external security environment in a way not seen "probably since the 1940s" and would make American access into the region much more challenging. READ MORE HERE.
   

• Senior US military officers and national security officials met with President Trump on Monday evening to discuss action against Syria – and potentially its patrons in Russia and Iran – for a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people outside Damascus at the weekend. Trump ordered a missile strike last year after a similar assault on civilians that he attributed to the Assad government. READ MORE HERE.
   

• President Trump last week proposed an additional $US100 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports, on top of the 25 per cent tariffs on $US50 billion of imports already mooted as retaliation for China's forced technology transfers and intellectual property rights violations. In his column for The Australian Financial Review on Monday, director of the Centre's Trade and Investment program, Stephen Kirchner, said the administration's proposed tariffs are the wrong remedy, inconsistent with its domestic and international legal obligations and will be ineffective in changing Chinese practice. READ MORE HERE.
   
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced the first of two congressional hearings overnight, testifying about his company's role in the Russian propaganda and Cambridge Analytica scandals  But anyone expecting genuine change or effective solutions from companies like Facebook has a long wait ahead of them, according to honorary associate Nicole Hemmer. In her column for The Age, she suggests social media is merely a reflection of society – and our time is better spent improving the latter. READ MORE HERE.
   
• 'The Man Who Is Glitterbombing New York City Politics' is the name of a fascinating feature in Sunday's New York Magazine, profiling the New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. Usually a staid political scene, both New York's city and state politics has suddenly become a major battleground in the fight for the heart of the Democratic Party. An ongoing feud between New York's mayor and governor, and actress Cynthia Nixon's decision to nominate for the Democratic nomination in November's gubernatorial election has made the state a must-watch in 2018. READ MORE HERE.

President Trump, I’m speaking to you directly. Do not take the same mistake that President Obama had made. The action that you had taken... to take out the air base there, that was important, that was strong — that was a very strong message. What we need to do right now is to take out Assad’s air force. If we ground all of his air force, he won’t have the capability to attack Syrians by the air anymore.

The Syrian American Council's Bassam Rifai
(Fox News)
10 April 2018

ANALYSIS

America's original modern family returns for the Trump era

Rodney Taveira
Lecturer in American Studies

When the first season of Roseanne aired across 1988–89 it was called, by some critics, “slob comedy”. Variety declared that the Conners were “appalling TV role models” in its review of the first episode. Taking stock of the reactions she triggered, Roseanne Barr, writing in The New York Times, said she’d become “a sort of postfeminist mud pie in the eye to the Super Mom Syndrome”.

Previous television mothers and their families had a homely glamour. I Love Lucy! told us what to do with respect to Lucille Ball. (By the way, the premise of this show isn’t “Lucy wants to get into show business” but “Lucy wants to get out of the house!”) The adventures of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet never ventured far from their lovely SoCal home. And before she got her eponymous show where she was a single, career woman, Mary Tyler Moore lived in a lovely home in New Rochelle, New York, second fiddle in The Dick Van Dyke Show. 

Roseanne Barr, during her career as a stand-up comedian, skewered this vision of American motherhood and femininity in her Domestic Goddess routine: “Oh hi. It’s a thrill to be out of the house… I have three kids and I’ve been married for fourteen years so I breed well in captivity.” 

She was crass and vulgar. She let it all hang out, appearing in a bikini onstage. In Roseanne, she fights with her boss (George Clooney with a rather Trumpian haircut—plus sideburns) to knock off early for a parent-teacher conference about her daughter Darlene, who has been barking like a dog. Unpaid bills accumulated on the Conner family fridge as both Roseanne and her husband Dan scramble for overtime and through odd jobs. The Conners were not and are not the Cosbys, the Seavers, the Keatons, and definitely not the Cleavers.

While they were and are a kind of Modern Family (Roseanne organised her boss’s gay wedding; her mother comes out; she and her mother debate aborting a fifth-season pregnancy), the Conners more easily fit into that recent category cum proud camp of the culture wars: the Deplorables. But using “slob comedy” and “deplorables” in a strictly pejorative sense obscures the history of the television medium and the complexity of the supposed sides, and it exaggerates the special or marginal status of the world of Roseanne.

Roseanne Conner is a contemporary, female version of Archie Bunker from All in The Family, who himself is a version of Ralph Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners. Gleason, abandoned by his father when he was nine and living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, famously kept the set of The Honeymooners dilapidated, delivering curtains sent by a fan to dress the kitchen windows to a nearby children’s hospital.

Archie Bunker, the loudmouth, bigoted blue-collar worker was supposed to be the voice of prejudiced patriarchy against which the 1970s social movements were agitating, but instead he came to be loved in a case of misidentification by the audience (“Archie Bunker for President!” declared bumper stickers) and the producers. By casting herself as a Trump voter in the reboot, Roseanne positions herself as the arch debunker of liberal Hollywood, scandalising the progressively pious mainstream, speaking her mind, giving voice to those who don’t hear themselves in national media conversations.

Did President Trump, then, steal her routine? She’s played off and muddied the distinction between her personal life, her slapdash politics, and her media profile. She ran her vituperative 2012 presidential campaign on Twitter. Her crotch-grabbing rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” outraged the nation but it didn’t end her career — Roseanne ran for eight more years. That’s a two-term presidency.

DIARY

The week ahead

• Wednesday, 11 April: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Facebook's use and protection of user data.
   

• Wednesday, 11 April: The US Labor Department releases March inflation figures.
   

• Thursday, 12 April: Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. are scheduled to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on the FY2019 National Defense Authorization Budget request from the Department of Defense.
   

• Sunday, 15 April: Former FBI director James Comey will give his first interview since being fired by President Trump to ABC's George Stephanopoulos on 20/20.
   

• Tuesday, 17 April: James Comey's book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, is released.

EVENT

Violent crime in the United States: Focus, prevention and legitimacy

VIDEO

President Trump on raid of attorney Michael Cohen: "It's an attack on our country"

THE WEEK IN TWEETS

#MichaelCohen

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University of Sydney NSW 2006

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