The Daily Parker

Oh, I hope this art installation flies:

In a planned one-day protest, four golden pig balloons will take anchor in the Chicago River, lined up to cover President Donald Trump's last name on his building's southeast facade.  

The giant swine come by way of Chicago-based design company New World Design Ltd., and will arrive by barge. New World is still negotiating how and when the pigs will arrive, but architect and firm principal Jeffrey Roberts says he is confident the project will come to fruition.  With the city's approval, which is still pending, the massive pigs will pop up for a day in late August or early September.

I'm looking forward to the day when the letters adorning that garish skyscraper come off permanently.

The New Yorker's Evan Osnos explores how President Trump might leave office before the end of his term, and how likely that is:

Trump’s approval rating is forty per cent—the lowest of any newly elected President since Gallup started measuring it. Even before Trump entered the White House, the F.B.I. and four congressional committees were investigating potential collusion between his associates and the Russian government. Since then, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have become senior White House officials, prompting intense criticism over potential conflicts of interest involving their private businesses. Between October and March, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics received more than thirty-nine thousand public inquiries and complaints, an increase of five thousand per cent over the same period at the start of the Obama Administration. Nobody occupies the White House without criticism, but Trump is besieged by doubts of a different order, centering on the overt, specific, and, at times, bipartisan discussion of whether he will be engulfed by any one of myriad problems before he has completed even one term in office—and, if he is, how he might be removed.

Trump’s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit. During the past few months, I interviewed several dozen people about the prospects of cutting short Trump’s Presidency. I spoke to his friends and advisers; to lawmakers and attorneys who have conducted impeachments; to physicians and historians; and to current members of the Senate, the House, and the intelligence services. By any normal accounting, the chance of a Presidency ending ahead of schedule is remote. In two hundred and twenty-eight years, only one President has resigned; two have been impeached, though neither was ultimately removed from office; eight have died. But nothing about Trump is normal. Although some of my sources maintained that laws and politics protect the President to a degree that his critics underestimate, others argued that he has already set in motion a process of his undoing. All agree that Trump is unlike his predecessors in ways that intensify his political, legal, and personal risks.

Osnos does a good job of lining up those risks, how they might manifest, and how Trump's large and growing opposition might use them. It's worth the time.

Also worth noting in the same issue, David Remnick comments on Trump's first 100 days.

The president gave a series of interviews yesterday that have people across the political spectrum perplexed, to say the least. Josh Marshall says they "generally seemed to be the work of a man simply tossing off ideas, rambling or simply drifting in and out of consciousness" and wonders if Trump "was experiencing some sort of collapse of cognition."

Politico has more:

President Donald Trump questioned why the Civil War— which erupted 150 years ago over slavery — needed to happen. He said he would be "honored" to meet with Kim Jong-Un, the violent North Korean dictator who is developing nuclear missiles and oppresses his people, under the "right circumstances."

The president floated, and backed away from, a tax on gasoline. Trump said he was "looking at" breaking up the big banks, sending the stock market sliding. He seemed to praise Philippines strongman President Rodrigo Duterte for his high approval ratings. He promised changes to the Republican health care bill, though he has seemed unsure what was in the legislation, even as his advisers whipped votes for it.

And Monday still had nine hours to go.

Trump's comments questioning the need for the Civil War, aired Monday afternoon, seemed to disregard history and downplay slavery, several historians said.

"White supremacists, lost causers, states-rights activists could latch onto this,” said David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University. “I don’t know if Trump even knows he’s doing it. You can be too ignorant to know you’re ignorant.”

Chicago Tribune writer Dahleen Glanton points out the obvious:

Trump likely was suggesting that he and his role model, President Andrew Jackson — a man who celebrated white supremacy and subjugating Native Americans — could have done a better job than Abraham Lincoln staving off the war through negotiations. That is unlikely, considering how Trump has further divided Americans during the short time he has been in office.

In the Civil War, one side had to step aside before America could move forward. There was no room for compromise. The ideals of the two sides were so mismatched, their views of right and wrong too diabolically opposed and their visions for America too different. Doesn't that sound familiar?

And over at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin wonders, "When is it okay to say the president might be nuts?"

I think it's OK, Jennifer. Because if he's not nuts, then he's doing this on purpose. Which is worse?

Just a quick observation, which I hope to expand upon later. Critics and supporters of President Trump alike have noticed that not only has he failed to achieve anything important on his own in the 102 days he's been in office, but the failures more resemble "a bullshit artist who caves easily and is best either ignored" than one would expect from a self-professed master of the art of the deal. (On the other hand, he has successfully enriched himself and his family through corruption, and will continue to do so until someone stops him, so he hasn't failed in all his objectives.)

But his biggest failure might be not understanding the intense scrutiny of his office and how that affects his deal-making skills. If his entire fortune is based on bluster and bullshit, then having to do all of that in public all the time seriously undermines the strategy. Take Mexico, for example: after gearing up for an intense diplomatic battle with the administration, Mexicans have essentially realized Trump is a paper tiger, and have started ignoring him entirely. That will make it hard for Trump to get any kind of a deal from them.

In short: his success in private, one-on-one deals doesn't translate to public, multi-lateral, diplomatic and political dealing. And he was too ignorant or stupid to see that.

Still think he's a business genius?

President Trump met with the 2017 state Teachers of the Year yesterday, and, as usual, made the event all about himself:

Usually, the National Teacher of the Year speaks. This year, that didn’t happen. Usually, the president spends some time talking with the teachers, giving many of them individual attention. That barely happened Wednesday, according to several participants who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because they said they fear Trump addressing them on Twitter or press secretary Sean Spicer bringing them up at a daily briefing. Usually family members join the winners to meet the president. This time few were allowed — and relatives of the teachers, some who had traveled at their own expense for many hours to attend, were left to wait in a building near the White House, with, as one said, “no water in the hot rooms.”

Rather than a ceremony in the East Room or the Rose Garden, as past presidents have done, Trump invited the teachers into the Oval Office, where he asked them all to gather around him, standing, while he sat at his desk. In the crowd were first lady Melania Trump, Vice President Pence, second lady Karen Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. It was the first lady’s birthday, and the teachers sang “Happy Birthday” to her.

In the Oval Office, with the teachers and others standing around him, Trump spoke about the teachers and engaged with a few of them (see video above), and briefly singled out the 2017 National Teacher of the Year, Sydney Chaffee, from Codman Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, Mass. A ninth-grade teacher, she is the first national winner from a charter school in the program’s 65-year history....

How interesting that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has financial stakes in charter schools, oversaw an event where a charter-school teacher won a major honor from her boss? And Trump still couldn't be gracious about it.

Read the rest of the article for how Presidents Obama and G.W. Bush honored the teachers, and ponder how often Trump will, over the next 1,362 days, 

Things to read today:

• Chicago Magazine bemoans the loss of two-flat apartment buildings in the city, citing increasing average rents.
• Josh Marshall catalogs all the times President Trump was surprised by knowledge that was only new to him.
• VIA Rail in Canada is offering a 10-day, Montreal to Vancouver rail journey to celebrate the country's sesquicentennial.
• Marin County, Calif., has an app that lets you try to mitigate climate-change induced flooding. Good luck.

And finally, the Chicago Tribune has an article on our concert this weekend, and composer Jeff Beal performing in it:

"I suppose it might have been DNA asserting itself," said Beal, who will be in Chicago May 5 and Evanston May 7 when the celebrated Apollo Chorus includes his "The Salvage Men" and "Poor in Spirit" as part of their 145th-season-ending spring concert, "American Masters," in Chicago and Evanston. "It's true that [my grandmother] passed on her love of improvisation, but there's also something almost eerily similar about what she did, watching a screen and creating her own musical accompaniment, and what I do in my day job."

[H]e had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. Though he took seven years to process the news before beginning to write "The Salvage Men" in 2014.

Serendipitously, that was about the time that Apollo Chorus music director Stephen Alltop, who studied with Beal at Eastman, got back in touch to praise Beal's work on" House of Cards" and suggest the possibility of doing a concert together. Which explains why Beal and his new choral works are appearing in Chicago directly after their debuts in London and Los Angeles. Beal also will perform solo trumpet over the comparatively simple text of his "Poor in Spirit," — it consists entirely of one repeated phrase from the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit" — much as he often plays trumpet over the score of "House of Cards."

Tickets are available through the Apollo Chorus website. It's going to be an amazing concert.

Some articles:

• Jeet Heer writes about President Trump's catastrophic first 100 days.
• Josh Marshall says that Trump's "religion of 'winning'" is the problem.
• Crain's Joe Cahill thinks that the best thing to come out of the United Airlines passenger-removal fiasco is that Oscar Munoz won't become chairman.
• John Oliver on Sunday warned the world about the deficiencies and scary realities of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
• Harvard professor David Searls, in a post from September 2015, calls ad blocking "the biggest boycott in human history."
• Microsoft has announced Azure Media Player v2.0. If you don't know or don't care what this is, don't worry about it. Similarly, you might not care about Lift & Shift vs. App Services in Microsoft Azure, but it's a useful bit of knowledge if you do.
• Starbucks is building a five-story roastery in the space currently occupied by Crate & Barrel's flagship store on Michigan Avenue.
• Sarah Zhang, writing in The Atlantic, reviews Peter Ungar's book on the evolution of teeth.
• Mother Jones' Josh Harkinson explains why American milk tastes weird to everyone else in the world.
• Deeply Trivial continues her A-to-Z explanation of statistics with "V is for Venn Diagram," which includes jokes that some people will find funny and some will not.

And now, Parker needs a walk.

Property values in Chicago's Trump Tower have declined as other similar properties have gotten pricier. Go figure:

"I've never seen such a glut" of condos for sale, said real estate agent Carla Walker of KoenigRubloff Berkshire Hathaway. "When people live where they've paid $1.5 million and up, they don't want to see people hanging out and demonstrating. And there's still a stigma there for some people."

The number for sale "is amazing," said Gail Lissner, vice president of Appraisal Research Counselors. "I've never seen that number for sale since they opened, and there have been very few transactions."

Only four units sold this year, and there was a decline in the number sold last year compared with the previous year, she said. There are about 52 residential units for sale now. With the addition of the hotel condos also on the market in the building, the number of units for sale jumps to about 70.

Based on the residential units alone, the number of available condos in Trump Tower is almost three times higher than other large condo buildings downtown, according to Lissner's data. No comparison is perfect, because the very high-end Elysian and Waldorf buildings are small with little turnover in units. But Lissner said that while Trump Tower has 52 of its 486 units on the market, the John Hancock building has 26 out of 703 for sale; Water Tower Place has 9 out of 260 for sale; Aqua has 12 out of 262 for sale; 340 on the Park has 11 out of 343; 600 N. Lake Shore Drive has 20 out of 395; and The Heritage has 5 out of 358.

Apparently the massive "TRUMP" logo on the southeast wall of the building is not what people in heavily-urban, heavily-Democratic Chicago want to pay extra for.

On Friday, President Trump sat down with AP reporter Julie Pace, and...well...here's the transcript, annotated by WaPo.

I suppose I have to read it, but even in the first few moments, I'm struggling.

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption:

• Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country.
• Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions.
• Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season.
• Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years.
• Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part of Germany) disappearing?
• Microsoft has some new guidance on building scalable solutions with DocumentDB.

Now, I must prepare...for Whisky Fest!