…the prince likely calculates that if he does show significant regret over Khashoggi, he will be showing weakness to his domestic opponents, perhaps even giving them grounds for a coup attempt. Still, there’s a broader context here to which the U.S. must pay close heed. Some nations haven’t been criticizing bin Salman over the Khashoggi incident. Specifically, Russia. Vladimir Putin has always seen the alignment of Saudi interests under Russia as the centerpiece of his Middle Eastern strategy. And if the West overplays its hand in pressuring bin Salman over the Khashoggi incident, it will risk seeing him realign with Russia. That would be a disaster for Saudi Arabia’s long-term political reform.

Now, Saudi Arabia is on the pillory and could well be grouped together with other rogue states that jail critics or even murder them abroad. That is a situation that even Trump finds unacceptable. Saudi Arabia’s power in the Arab and Muslim world is greatly dependent upon US support. Without it, Saudi Arabia will not be able to keep up its hard line against Iran. A weakened Saudi Arabia would also be unable to help facilitate the US approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Saudis know that eventually you’ll probably see whatever evidence Turkey has regarding Khashoggi’s disappearance, but they think you don’t like admitting you are friends with the wrong crowd; you said you love North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but he hasn’t earnestly committed to denuclearization. You said our relationship with Putin is fine even though he still poses a threat to our elections and our democracy. Similarly, you visited Saudi Arabia as your first foreign trip and touted your relationship with the kingdom. So, expect the Saudis to privately play up with you, how close you have become, especially compared to your predecessor, and the great strides you are making on countering Iran, which is a shared priority.

By pushing through questions and by capitalizing on an interview approach seeking to synthesize his entire presidency into two segments of television, Trump effectively converted “60 Minutes” into a short rally. There are those who will see his rants as worthy, and those who will loathe them; whatever unity can be made to exist by the President exists only within those camps. That “60 Minutes” went looking for something greater is more proof than viewers needed that their approach to the President left them outmatched.

But Trump also showed signs that reports from the last month — including an anonymous New York Times op-ed describing a “quiet resistance” within the Trump administration, as well as a story alleging that the deputy attorney general considered wearing a wire to record the president — have heightened his sense of loneliness and feelings of paranoia in the nation’s capital. “I don’t trust everybody in the White House, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump said, revealing that he is “usually guarded” during meetings.

President Donald Trump likes to keep an open mind when it comes to a number of matters — sexual misconduct allegations, Vladimir Putin’s election meddling denials, the Saudi government’s insistence it knows nothing about the disappearance and possible murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But there’s one group of people he’s not so keen on believing: climate scientists.

…the notion that Jewish self-determination is a form of racism is purely anti-Semitic… Fight for a campus that respects you, your Judaism, and your Zionism. Fight for a progressive movement that values you as a fully actualized person and is inclusive of you and your heritage even when you have serious disagreements on specific policies. Fight for an Israel that reflects your Jewish values by supporting organizations in Israel. Fight for a Zionism that you define, that you believe in, with policies you support.

While Zionism for Israeli Jews is a form of nationalism or perhaps patriotism, for Diaspora Jews, Zionism, including liberal Zionism, can only be described as a claim for privilege. It’s not exactly white privilege — Jews come from all over the world and belong to all races — but it is a form of privilege that mimics white privilege… Liberal Zionists enjoy a uniquely duplicitous position vis-a-vis this privilege. They imagine Zionism represents the potential for a just community and remain committed to present-day Israel, enjoying its benefits but without taking responsibility for the violence necessary to sustain a Jewish-nation state.

The truth is – much to my ongoing horror and disgust – the Democratic Party can kick around Jews from now until Yom Kippur and we will still pound on their doors to give them our money, our votes, and our support… After about twenty-five years I walked away from the Democratic Party and the American-Left because I could no longer stand the hypocrisy. This is because I absolutely refuse to support any political party, or any political movement, that demands – with great self-righteous indignation – that they stand for anti-racism and anti-sexism and liberalism, when, in truth, they stand none of those things.

Trump is no longer a mystery. He is among the most transparent of public figures. The mystery is that it all works. The stock market, even with this week’s drop, has been at record highs. Unemployment is at record lows. Consumer and business confidence is robust. How can this be? According to basic economic theory, businesspeople should look at this chaos and realize it is unsustainable. G.O.P. politicians and some sympathetic economists argue that the tax cuts and deregulation are spurring business. But there is one idea that Keynesians and Chicago School thinkers have long agreed upon: It is always possible to give an economy a sugar rush, a short-term boost, by flushing huge amounts of government money through the system.

Blame Jerome Powell for this week’s roller coaster ride on the Dow. Every single time the Fed chairman speaks about interest rates, he has investors from sea to shining sea hitting the sell button. Powell is a bigger headwind to Trump’s economy than China. No wonder Trump has come out swinging against Powell, his own pick to lead the Federal Reserve.

Mr. Trump’s open attacks on the Federal Reserve could hurt its credibility. Households, firms and investors trust the Fed to do what’s necessary to manage inflation, even if that means taking politically unpopular decisions such as raising interest rates when the economy is growing fast. When the president says that the Fed is “crazy” and “out of control” or comments that he is “not happy” or “disappointed” with the Fed’s rate decisions, he could cause irreparable damage. Investors’ confidence in the Fed as an institution that is unmoved by shifting political winds is essential to keeping the dollar strong. The dollar’s dominance may outlast the Trump era, but it is not inevitable.

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness. Reality is nothing like this… the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.”

Polarization isn’t symmetrical. Both sides do it very differently, because they come from very different political cultures… Democrats (and liberals generally) are driven by trying to solve specific problems and negotiating between different interests. This is precisely what the “Hidden Tribes” report would like everyone to do. But it takes two to tango, and conservatives are ideologically uninterested in solving problems, which they view as “government intrusion,” “meddling” or “overreach.”

… division can be useful by providing clarity about the serious moral disagreements underlying many political debates. What’s not good is division for the sake of division, which is often currently labeled tribalism… Those of us who have important things to persuade people of need to rediscover effective, non-manipulative ways of doing so, and we may right now have a good opening to do just that. This is what it means to govern ourselves in a constitutional republic: to earn consent. In fact, that’s precisely the underlying reason for guaranteeing the antidote to political correctness: free speech. It says something about the left that they are not confident enough in their ideas to subject them to a free and open hearing aimed at honest persuasion, but instead seek to coerce people into compliance through political correctness and other social manipulations.

How about a #MeToo movement for executive compensation? No joke. Corporate America has abused shareholders for too long. They have made a mockery of fairness, taste and responsible capitalism. They have no more idea of proper incentives than Harvey Weinstein had of employee relations. Their unceasing grabbing of tens of millions of other people’s (their shareholders’) money bespeaks a single phrase: the arrogance of power. They need a reset. General Electric brought this to mind — the company that just, and for the second time in a year, replaced its CEO. It hired Lawrence Culp, a former CEO of Danaher, as chief executive. Without blushing, GE awarded Culp a contract that could be worth $300 million over the next four years. Even for mediocre performance, Culp should take home $85 million. If those numbers don’t shock you, you have been spending too much time reading the business pages.

I appreciate that GE is a complicated company with complicated problems, but part of the run-up in its stock price following Culp’s appointment is based on a perception that he’s already well-versed on GE’s challenges after serving on the board for the past six months and will be able to hit the ground running. I’ve been skeptical of that narrative, given how much worse off GE is than Danaher ever was, but more importantly, how endemic and interconnected some of the company’s challenges are.

A conglomerate’s virtue is supposedly the ability of unrelated or partly related businesses to help each other through tough times. The downside is that the stock price of a big and complex company is unlikely to register buried problems until they are far advanced. GE’s stock price long ago decided the conglomerate function wasn’t working. Under legendary CEO Jack Welch, some derided GE as a “faith stock” but his team earned the market’s confidence by showing they were on top of problems and reacted quickly to poor performance.