LAST WEEK, DONALD Trump appeared before a rally in Iowa, where he regaled a crowd of supporters with stories of the great wealth of his inner circle of advisers. “When you get the president—this is the president of Goldman Sachs—smart!—having him represent us, he went from massive paydays to peanuts!” he boasted. The crowd applauded, as people passionate enough about a politician to attend a rally are wont to do. But the thing about Trump’s core supporters is that Trump doesn’t have enough of them. To win the election, he had to pry away some former Obama voters in the Midwest, and he did it

In Washington, the ‘first law of holes’ is one of those shopworn maxims that are so familiar, they need not be spoken. It’s like what you should do if you want a friend in the capital: ‘Get a dog’ goes without saying. But maybe things are different where Donald Trump came from. And maybe that’s why he didn’t know what to do when he found his young presidency in a small hole involving contacts between a few of his underlings and Russian officials. Now he’s learning the local folklore the hard way. The first law of holes is, if you’re in one, stop digging. Three times, Trump heard assurances f

The blue-eyed boy with the chubby cheeks still talks about the after-school movies he used to love so much. This was three years ago, when he was just 9 and living on the outskirts of Raqqa, in northern Syria. Sometimes, his father would take him and his little brother to an outdoor makeshift theater downtown, or he’d go with his teacher and classmates. They’d sit on plastic chairs and munch on cookies in front of a big-screen TV shielded from the sun by an umbrella. The films varied, but the plot was always the same: Black-clad members of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) “liberated” ci