One of the chief intrigues of this year’s March Madness, the annual college basketball tournament epic in both scale and financial heft, is whether Cooper Flagg will recover from an ankle-twist and resume his sensational form.
The 18-year-old is the latest miracle of genes and discipline to emerge from the shadowlands of high-school sports supremacy – he grew up in small town Maine – and step, with accepting grace, into the dazzling arena of nascent superstardom.
Barack Obama, one of the millions of Americans who indulge in the annual “bracketology” obsession, has chosen Duke to win it all. If Flagg is fit, they probably will.
Obama’s fascination with basketball was one of his political calling cards from the get-go. But this year, the fact that the Democrat’s incomparable daystar of hope is offering college basketball predictions while his party colleagues are warning of the end-days for American democracy itself illuminates the strangeness of the United States in this moment.
President Donald Trump shows up on television more frequently than many of the country’s highest-profile anchors. His thirst for the camera lights is insatiable. On Monday, he gave Fox host Laura Ingraham an impromptu tour of the Oval Office. It made for a fascinating seven minutes. As they strolled past the Rose Garden, which leads to the Oval, Ingraham asked him about a rumour that is circulating.
“Are you paving over the grass here?”
Trump’s response was a perfect example of his ability to trade in both specific detail and general evasion.
“Every event you have – it’s soaking wet ... and people can’t ... and the women with the high heels, its just too much .. it doesn’t work and we have the gorgeous stone and everything else .. but you know we use it for press conferences and people fall into the ...”
“The roses stay? The rest goes?” Ingraham said helpfully.
“No, it’s a rose garden ... no all of this stays, just the centre section ... I think it’s gonna be beautiful. Look at that view over there!”
The Voice of America, a staple on global airwaves since 1942, fell silent after the Trump administration put some 1,300 members staff on leave
So is Trump paving over the Jackie’s rose garden, then? Yes. No. Maybe. So it goes with the larger question as to whether the United States is in the process of unmooring itself from its democratic tenets.
In the Oval, Trump proudly showcased the transformation. He told Ingraham he had inspected “the vaults” and freed many presidential portraits from obscurity. The Oval walls now look as though they are packing more art works than Trafalgar Square’s National Portrait Gallery. He’d also rescued another gem: the actual Declaration of Independence, hidden by drapes to protect it from the sunlight – and possibly the reflection of the Trumpian peroxide.
“We have to do something like drapes or something. And ... it’s very cool.”
It’s hardly a secret that Donald Trump is entering his second term with one eye on posterity. Hardly a week goes by without him invoking the name of George Washington. He is gunning to snag the Nobel Peace Prize. But the blizzard-like breadth of activity and conflicting ideology has left his opponents and the intelligentsia grasping as to what that posterity will look like.
Increasingly, his opponents are describing this administration as authoritarian. This week’s confrontation with the department of justice, in which conservative chief justice John Roberts issued a rebuke after Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration over the legality of a deportation flight, brings both branches closer to a showdown.
Colin Powell and Medgar Evers, the second World War veteran and civil rights leader, are among the black Americans whose names have been removed from Arlington Cemetery website as part of the DEI purge.
Elsewhere, The Voice of America, a staple on global airwaves since 1942, fell silent after the Trump administration put some 1,300 members staff on leave.
“Adolf Hitler couldn’t silence it,” observed the Washington Post.
“Joseph Stalin and his successors, right up through Vladimir Putin, couldn’t silence it. Mao Zedong and his successors, through Xi Jinping, couldn’t silence it. Ruhollah Khomeini and the ayatollahs couldn’t silence it. But Donald Trump has just silenced the voice of freedom.”
The Post itself has been used by many commentators as an example of the way in which the media voice in this country is under assault and is slowly being cowed and muted. The recent arrests of pro-Palestinian Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and others will almost certainly ensure that the lawns of the Ivy League quadrangles remain protest-free this spring. As the week comes to an end, plans to gut the department of education and return the responsibility of educating the US’s young people to the states, have gathered force. The comes the international dramas – tariffs, the Gulf, Greenland.
The Trump argument is that all of this is a plausible and necessary implementation of measures required to undo the manifold disasters of the Biden era. Nobody in the United States speaks Joe Biden’s name as frequently as Donald Trump, as though to remind the voters of the alternative.
So, the political arguments rage in the background of life while on the television screens, the college hoops extravaganza offers the familiar rhythms and sounds of arriving spring, of longer evenings.
On Thursday, McNeese produced the first shock of the tournament by defeating Clemson. The result wrecked 85 per cent of all brackets, including that of former president Obama. The sportscasters said: wow, nobody could see that coming.
