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The button that could have started a nuclear holocaust is grey not red.

I learned this after climbing into a nuclear rocket command silo, 12 floors below ground, and sitting in the same green chair at the same yellow, metal console at which former Soviet officers once presided. Here, they practiced entering secret codes into their grey keyboards, pushing the launch button and turning a key all within seven seconds to fire up to 10 ballistic missiles. The officers never knew what day their practice codes might become real, nor did they know their targets.

This base in Pervomaysk, Ukraine about a four-hour drive from Kiev once had 86 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of destroying cities in Europe and the United States. Though the nuclear warheads have been removed, the command silo with much of its equipment, giant trucks that carried the rockets to the base and an empty silo were preserved so that people could see what had been secretly going on at nuclear missile bases in the former Soviet Union. The museums collection includes the R-12/SS-4 Sandal missile similar to those involved in the Cuban missile crisis and the RS-20A/SS-18 Satan, the versions of which had several hundred times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

An RS-20A/SS-18 Satan missile at the former Soviet base in Pervomaysk (Cheryl L Reed/Washington Post)

This is what the tourists come to see, says Igor Bodnarchuk, a tour guide for SoloEast Travel, a Kiev company that specialises in tours of Soviet ruins. What else do we have to offer?

Tourists go to Paris to marvel at the majesty of the Eiffel Tower, to Rome to stroll the cobbled streets of the Vatican, to Moscow to behold the magnificent domes of Red Square. And while Ukraine has its own plethora of domed cathedrals, including monasteries with underground caves, thousands of tourists are trekking to this country for a uniquely Soviet experience. Here, they stand outside an exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and rifle through the remains of a nearby abandoned city Geiger counter in hand. In Chernobyls shadow, they marvel at the giant Moscow Eye, an anti-ballistic-missile detector that rises 50 stories high and looks like a giant roller coaster.

Every day, a handful of travel companies ferry mostly foreigners to Chernobyls 19-mile exclusion zone. In 2016, SoloEast Travel hauled 7,500 people there, up from only one trip in 2000.

It used to be sort of extreme travel, says Sergei Ivanchuk of SoloEast Travel. You were very brave to go to Chernobyl in 2000. Now, not so much.

Ivanchuk insists that people who go to Chernobyl are not morbid. They are intelligent people who want to learn something new, and are often interested in nuclear power, he says.

Gennadiy Fil, once a Soviet army officer stationed at the base, is now a tour guide (Cheryl L Reed/Washington Post)

Likewise, people who venture to the missile base at Pervomaysk are interested in the Cold War. Its a place to remember like the Holocaust about a dangerous time in history and what it means to have nuclear weapons, he says.

Earlier this year, Russia deployed a new cruise missile, apparently violating its 1987 arms-control treaty with the United States. In light of that event, the Soviet ruins in Ukraine seem all the more relevant.

The day I visit the former 46th Rocket Division in Pervomaysk, silver engines gleam in the sunlight and missiles stick out of the snow. Nearby is a surface-to-air missile similar to the one that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in July 2014.

The museum tour guides are all former Soviet officers who once worked at the missile base. Ours, Gennadiy Fil, once manned the nuclear controls. When American tourists dally, snapping photos of the rockets above ground, he barks: Ledz go!

Then he darts through a heavy door of a squat building, down a series of winding stairs and through an underground tunnel, navigating by memory through the narrow, 500-foot-long passageway to the control centre in a silo. The narrow cylinder is suspended from the ground theoretically, to withstand the shock of a counterattack.

From this seat at the former Pervomayskmissile base, an officer could launch up to 10 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (Cheryl L Reed/Washington Post)

In six-hour shifts, Fil and another officer would descend in a tiny elevator (maximum capacity: three people) to the bottom of the silo. Stationed at metal consoles in an 11-by-11 control room, they would read secret codes from Moscow that flashed on a computer screen, then quickly tap them into a dingy yellow monitor. Then, they pressed a small, grey button and turned a key on the opposite side of the terminal to launch up to 10 nuclear rockets at once.

You dont launch just one missile, because the other side is going to shoot back and destroy you, explains Elena Smerichevskaya, our Ukrainian interpreter. An intercontinental ballistic rocket fired at New York, she explains, would take about 25 minutes to hit its target.

Fil, 55, says he never knew when he would be ordered to input real codes. It was his job, he says and shrugs. He says he had no moral objections to pushing the button. Launching nuclear missiles was a political decision, something that people on top of the ground decided, not him.

He admits that he was scared about the possibility of nuclear war. Youd have to be crazy in the head not to be scared, he says.

But just in case Fil or a fellow officer (two officers were required to launch a rocket) refused to push their buttons, reserve officers could be called up from a compartment beneath the control centre.

For officers like Fil, there were both mental and physical challenges. The compartments were hermetically sealed, and Fil says there was immense pressure on their ears. There were also concerns about the psychological impact of being isolated in the chambers. While the Soviets kept enough food and water on hand for 45 days, some men started to become batty after only two or three days inside the silo bunker, Smerichevskaya says.

Because the government took out windows from many of the buildings in Pripyat, the interiors were exposed to the elements (Cheryl L Reed/Washington Post)

While Fil is glad the world didnt implode under his watch, he says he is sad to have lost his job behind the missile controls.

In 1994, three years after Ukraine became independent, it joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and agreed to dismantle its 1,900 Soviet missiles. At the time, Ukraine boasted the worlds third-largest stockpile of nuclear warheads after Russia and the United States. Ukraine shipped its nuclear warheads to Russia and dismantled its silos, often blowing them up or filling them with cement. The control silo at Pervomaysk was the only one spared so it could become a museum. The 46th Rocket Division, part of the Soviet 43rd Rocket Army, was disbanded in 2001.

As a child growing up in the Cold War who was taught to hide under her school desk in case of a nuclear attack, its surreal to meet a man who at the same time had his fingers on the triggers of the Soviet Unions nuclear warheads.

Fil shakes his head at how things have changed. I never thought Id be standing here talking to an American, he says, his eyes wide with amazement. I never thought Id be having my picture taken. That was absolutely forbidden. And now ... its okay.

The museum claims that its silos are very similar to those still in operation in Russia. The Satanis still part of Russias weaponry, although an improved version is set to be operational in 2018. Before Russia invaded Crimea and backed the separatistswar on Ukraines eastern front, Russian soldiers frequently took their families to Pervomaysk to show them what they did at work, museum tour guides say. The missile sites in Russia remain secret.

The city of Pripyat was once a secret Soviet city, closed to anyone but workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and their families. Now the city, an hour-and-a-half drive from Kiev, is a nuclear ghost town. Forty-nine thousand people were forced to evacuate the day after Chernobyls Reactor No4 exploded on 26 April 1986.

The floor of a school in Pripyat is littered with gas masks meant for schoolchildren, but, according to tour guides, were never used (Cheryl LReed/Washington Post)

Nearly all the first responders and soldiers died from radiation poisoning while trying to contain the graphite fire and the radioactive particles spewing from the destroyed reactor, explainsBodnarchuk, our tour guide. Officially, only 31 firemen and soldiers were killed. But some believe that the disaster claimed at least 10,000 lives as wind carried radioactive material into Belarus and northern Europe.

Even though critics have said that the designs of Chernobyl are outmoded and inherently unsafe, Russia reportedly is still using 11 similar nuclear reactors.

Today, visitors can stand across the street from the damaged reactor at Chernobyl, which recently was covered by a huge, $2.3bn (1.7bn) shield. But the highlight of the tour is, by far, the crumbling city of Pripyat. Though tour operators are warned to stay out of Pripyats buildings, tourists routinely stomp through the city, including the hospital where dying first responders were taken.

Tourists stick their Geiger counters against tatters of clothing in the hospital lobby and watch their machines shoot up to shockingly high levels 85 microsieverts per hour. The normal range is 0.09 to 0.30 microsieverts per hour, according to the tour company. Most guides carry their own Geiger counters; many tourists come with their own.

Tour operators claim that a visit to Chernobyl is no more dangerous now than a flight from Ukraine to North America. This calculation includes spending 10 minutes in front of the burned-out reactor and no more than two hours in Pripyat.

SoloEast Travel has a video that shows how it came up with such mathematics. Those calculations, however, dont factor in hovering over a firefighters highly radioactive clothing that has been dug up from deep in the hospital. Nor do they specifically include driving through the red forest near the Chernobyl reactor where the radiation burned up all the trees, which were then bulldozed and buried. Our Geiger counters went crazy as we drove through the new-growth forest, registering 26 microsieverts per hour.

Our guide tried to calm fears about our exposure to radiation by assuring us that any high levels on our body would be detected by the machines we had to pass through on the way out of Chernobyls exclusion zone. Those machines old Soviet steel contraptions that look like retro airport metal detectors hardly inspire confidence.

To amplify tourists shock, guides have embellished some of the Pripyat remains.Amid hundreds of crumbling gas masks spread over the floor of a school, a baby doll has been placed on a chair wearing a gas mask. A hospital nursery has been outfitted with plastic dolls, placed in cribs with blankets, to make the scene appear even more macabre. Outside a village school building, old toys are scattered about. One-eyed teddy bears and dolls with missing limbs sit on bed springs at a village orphanage. Tables are set with plates and pots.

The most eerie scenes include an abandoned amusement park with its empty, lonely looking Ferris wheel and bumper cars filled with leaves; a swimming pool with cracked tiles, its deep end filled with trash and an old shopping cart; school hallways cluttered with books; school desks laid out with science experiments; posters of Lenin and other Soviet leaders adorning classroom walls; and a broken baby carriage abandoned in a decaying community centre.

Visitors are exhausted by the time their tour bus leaves Pripyat and turns down a one-lane road through a thick forest. Hiding there is the Moscow Eye, also known as the Russian Woodpecker, an enormous metal structure silhouetted against the sky like a vertical Stonehenge.

Using over-the-horizon radar, the Moscow Eye was the receiver for a powerful radio broadcast sent from elsewhere in Ukraine. Some say that the signals short, repetitive tapping noise soundedlike a bird thus the woodpecker moniker. Others sayit soundedmore like a machine gun. From 1976, until it went off the air in 1989, the unexplained radio signal interfered with many broadcasts. Listeners speculated that it was a method of Soviet mind control. Only in the past three years have tourists discovered its sublime metal architecture rising from the forest floor near Chernobyl, an anachronistic remnant from a not-so-distant era.

Washington Post

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The booming Soviet tourist industry in radioactive Ukraine - The Independent

A federal court told the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Monday that it has to enforce an Obama administration methane pollution rule.

The order from Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came after the judges gave the agency a two-week reprieve from its ruling earlier in July that the EPA broke the law when it tried to delay enforcement earlier.

Despite the reprieve, the Trump administration has not asked for the entire 11-judge court to rehear its case, the standard next step for appealing a ruling for a three-judge panel.

But industry groups and conservative states opposed to the regulation did ask for the full-court repeal, so the judges will consider their request in the coming weeks.

The rule sets standards for the oil and natural gas drilling industry that aim to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and the main component of natural gas.

It was a major part of former President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaObama team pushing Deval Patrick presidential run North Korea targeted emails of Clinton advisers: report Putin tests Trump with counterpunch on sanctions MOREs second-term climate change agenda.

The D.C. Circuit Court ruled in early July that the Trump administration overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act when it tried to unilaterally delay the rule while it works to repeal it.

The EPA is also working through the regulatory process to delay the regulation for an additional two years. It is gathering public comment untilAug. 9and could make the delay final after that.

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Court tells EPA to enforce Obama methane pollution rule

President Obama led the fight to protect everyone no matter who they are, where theyre from, what they look like, or whom they love. The Administrations work included pushing through sweeping rights and protections for LGBTQ Americans milestones we mark this Pride month as we learn from LGBTQ leaders organizing in their communities.

In December 2010, President Obama signed the Dont Ask, Dont Tell Repeal Act of 2010 into law, allowing gay men and women to serve openly and with integrity in the U.S. military.

Michael Rudulph and his partner Neil Rafferty talk about their service as gay Marines under the Dont Ask, Dont Tell policy.

In February 2011, the Obama Administration announced it would cease legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Acts provision defining marriage as only between a man and woman, leading to the Supreme Courts landmark decisions holding the Act unconstitutional.

Throughout his presidency, President Obama advocated in favor of a Constitutional guarantee of marriage equality for same-sex couplesa position the Supreme Court vindicated in its historic decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.

Edie Windsor talks to her lawyer Roberta Kaplan about how the 2009 death of Edies long-time partner, Thea Spyer, led to their landmark Supreme Court case which secured marriage equality nationwide.

Theres so much we still have to do to achieve full equality, and we at the Obama Foundation are committed to doing everything we can to empower and support the LGBTQ community. As part of our efforts, recently we talked to LGBTQ leaders in Chicago about how theyre organizing in their communities, and what citizenship means to them.

Lifelong Chicagoan, Mary Morten, shares why shes inspired by young people today and why its important for all of us no matter where we live or what our lives look like to start with our own communities.

Theresa and Mercedes, who have been together for more than twenty years, share why being involved with the LGBTQ community is important to them.

Patrick and Jim have been together for 54 years and organize around LGBTQ issues to fight for equality, justice, and fairness for all people.

More from community organizers in Chicago

We know from our own history that change happens because people push to make it happen. Weve got to do the hard work of educating others, showing empathy to others, changing hearts and minds. And when we do that, then change occurs. It doesnt come always as quickly as we like, but progress comes.

President Obama, June 13, 2013, Reception for LGBTQ Pride Month

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Celebrating Pride Month - Obama Foundation

After a presidential campaign endsparticularly if it ends badlythe campaigns once-innovative tools to target voters tend to collect dust along with unused boxes of buttons and bumper stickers. Unlike the campaign tchotchke, however, those data analytics and targeting tools could actually be useful to future national and state campaigns.

Now, a group of former Obama staffers is trying to break that cycle. The group, Higher Ground Labs , is taking a note from Sand Hill Road and applying venture-capital tactics to progressive politics. On Wednesday, Higher Ground is disclosing investments totaling nearly $1.5 million in 10 startups and enrolling them in a five-month accelerator program, during which theyll work with mentors from the political-tech space to build their businesses.

We havent built a culture around investors who invest in political tech in a real way. So people have had a hard time getting off the ground, says Betsy Hoover, a co-founder of Higher Ground, who worked for both Obama presidential campaigns in online and field organizing. I think theres a real moment to think about this differently.

Higher Ground, whose founders also include former Obama-administration staffers Shomik Dutta and Andrew McLaughlin, debuted in May. Since then, some 150 groups have applied to participate in the accelerator program and a related fellowship program. Higher Ground has raised $2.5 million from investors spanning politics and the tech industry. The companies receiving funding include Qriously , which uses programmatic online ads instead of phone calls to gauge public opinion, Victory Guide , a so-called digital campaign manager that gives local candidates a day-by-day agenda of campaign goals, and Tuesday Strategies , which helps volunteers send personalized text and social media messages to friends the campaign wants to reach.

Tuesday Strategies grew out of Hillary Clintons 2016 field organizing efforts in Michigan. Clinton lost Michigan, but Tuesday Strategies CEO Michael Luciani said the companys tactics helped the campaign beat its outreach targets in the state. Theres a much higher response rate, because its coming from a friend not a stranger, Luciani says of the personalized text messages.

Luciani and co-founders Shola Farber and Jordan Birnholtz say Higher Grounds investment will help Tuesday Strategies build and sustain its product as it gains campaign clients. Already, its working with state house, city council, and gubernatorial candidates in Virginia, New York and Michigan.

In many ways, whats happening on the left today mirrors what happened on the right in 2012 . Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book Prototype Politics , says Republicans realized after Obamas victory over Mitt Romney that they were at a technological disadvantage. Romney lost an election that people on the right believed he should have won, says Kreiss, who is tabulating how many new organizations have grown out of the 2016 election.

Perhaps the most powerful Republican startup to come from the post-2012 era is Cambridge Analytica , which ran the data operation for President Trumps campaign. Cambridge was unusual because it was backed by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, giving it the resources to sustain itself between presidential campaigns. Most political tech must rely on presidential campaigns and, to a lesser extent, mid-term elections to stay financially viable.

One of the things the right has seemingly done well is understand they could bankroll these larger ventures to insulate them during those off years, Kreiss says.

With Higher Ground, Hoover and her co-founders hope to do the same on the left. Theyre not the only ones. The Arena launched a PAC to fund promising progressive startups and individuals. Hillary Clintons own PAC, Onward Together , has awarded grants to groups like Swing Left, Emerge America, and Run for Something, which help fund state races and encourage new candidates to seek office.

To Hoover, thats a promising sign. And yet it raises the specter of dividing limited resources among many organizations that must prove their worth and may compete with one another for both donors and voters attention.

Hoover dismisses those concerns. They assume that theres a finite pie of money going around, and I just dont think thats the case, she says. Shes hoping the surge in interest on the left helps create tools and products that extend beyond a single election cycle.

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Obama Alums Pour $1.5 Million Into Progressive Tech Startups - WIRED

Barack Obama. Photo: Pool/Getty Images

Even though it yielded a broad array of historic policy reforms, during the eight years Barack Obama occupied the White House, his administration looked and felt to most of his supporters like a bitter slog of gridlock punctuated by half-measures. And it looked to his enemies like a period of untrammeled radicalism that would soon be reversed. Six months later, his record appears very different, viewed from both the left and the right. Any president would benefit from the contrast with Donald Trump, of course. But for many reasons, not merely the flamboyant shortcomings of the current administration, the Trump era provides a vantage point from which to understand the scale and durability of the 44th presidents accomplishments. Trump, quite by mistake, is revealing the true scale of his predecessors achievements.

One obvious source of newfound clarity is the renewed realization that governing is hard, especially in a polarized era with a form of government laden with legislative choke points. Obamas critics complained endlessly about the slow pace of legislation and the endless compromises wrung by interest groups and recalcitrant moderates. Liberals spent his presidency pining for imagined alternatives who could overpower the opposition. High-minded centrists endlessly blamed the president for his failure to dissuade Republicans from their strategy of total opposition, and in so doing helped reinforce the success of that opposition. Throughout his time in office, Obama labored against the contrast of hazy memories of presidents of yore who could supposedly reason with or overpower their foes and impose their legislative will.

But Trumps experience reveals that personal charm and ideological willpower can only go so far in steamrolling these obstacles. The legislative process is inherently, famously, ugly, but we have a way of forgetting that fact when it happens. The bipartisan disgust at the ungainly policy-making under Obama when a small, ultimately revoked break for Nebraska hospitals became a national scandal looks quaint now that we have seen true ugliness. Needless to say, a bill-signing after an extended debate and negotiation is a more positive outcome than the total legislative collapse Trump has overseen.

The Republican bases adoration of Trump, which differs only incrementally from its previous adoration of Sarah Palin, reveals just how nave it was to expect Obama to persuade the opposing party to cooperate. No compromise, no set of facts, could have placated a right-wing base in the grips of atavistic cultural fear and walled off from legitimate news sources.

A second source of clarity is the psychology of loss aversion, a common cognitive bias that makes people place far too little weight on new benefits they may have gained, and far too much on those they stand to lose. That dynamic makes any complex trade-off difficult, because the real or imagined losers from any change will make more noise than the winners. Uninsured Americans who stood to gain access to coverage had almost no voice in the debate when Obamacare was created. They have significant influence now that Republicans are attempting to strip away that coverage.

Loss aversion also helps explain why many of Obamas supporters undervalued the accomplishments of his presidency. The left shrugged at the passage of some of the most sweeping domestic reforms in decades. Obamacare? A very small number of people are going to get any insurance at all, until 2014, if the bill works, sniffed Howard Dean. This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. The Paris climate accord? Meh, said Bernie Sanders: We need bold action in the very near future and this does not provide that.

Trumps efforts to reverse these achievements has produced a very different assessment among supporters of these measures. Dean has called Trumps health-care rollback a disaster. Sanders has called his withdrawal from the Paris agreement an abdication of American leadership and an international disgrace. It is logically impossible for the repeal of an insignificant reform to be catastrophic. If it is a big deal to uninsure 24 million Americans and cut taxes on the rich, then it must be a big deal to insure 24 million and raise taxes on the rich. Yet the psychology of loss aversion is pervasive in American political thinking, especially on the left. The threat posed by Trump has allowed progressives to realistically assess the scale of Obamas achievements for the first time.

And finally, the last three months of Obamas presidency operated under the shadow of the descending Trumpian hordes who, everybody believed, would quickly wipe away Obamas policy agenda. The immediate juxtaposition of Trump and Obama framed the threat of the 45th presidents agenda against the precariousness of the 44ths.

My book defending the scale and durability of Obamas legacy came out during the peak moment of fear (from the left) and confidence (from the right) in Trumps powers. The alleged ease and certainty with which Trump would reverse Obamas achievements was invoked by critics from the right (Jonathan Chaits Audacity, which has the unfortunate distinction of having gone on sale 72 hours before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, rendering it utterly irrelevant as anything but a cultural artifact demonstrating the hubris of American liberalism) and the far left (Most of the successesAudacitytouts will likely be obsolete in the next few months. Congressional Republicans have already begun the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act.)

As I explain in that book, this was a strange and flawed way to think about the Obama legacy. Large chunks of Obamas achievements are not even theoretically vulnerable to reversal most obviously, the stimulus, bank rescue, and auto bailout, which rescued the economy from a second Great Depression. Trump would desperately love to repeal the Dodd-Frank law, which restructured the finance industry and established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but his party lacks the filibuster-proof supermajority required to attempt it.

Whats more, the practice of judging a presidents record by his successors antagonism to it is a new one, seemingly invented for Obama. Andrew Johnson undermined Lincolns legacy of liberating the slaves; conservative Republicans have tried to privatize or cut programs like Social Security and Medicaid decades later. Large chunks of the regulatory state like the National Labor Relations Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission now function only intermittently, turning feeble when Republicans control the Executive branch. And yet these facts do not usually make historians dismiss the importance of abolition or the New Deal or the Great Society.

Trumps presidency poses a threat to many enduring institutions of government, including the Constitution itself. That stark reality is no more reason to dismiss Obamas legacy than to dismiss James Madisons. And as the scale and nature of Trumps strange mix of fanaticism, corruption and incompetence sets in, we are coming to see it as a thing of its own, not the negation of the administration that preceded it.

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The most important reason so many people overestimated the ease with which Trump would overrun the Obama legacy is that they failed to grasp its breadth and depth, the degree to which its roots spread and its reforms took hold. Trumps struggles to knock down Obamas work have served to reveal how solidly it was constructed.

For eight years, Republicans drove themselves into a fever-pitch hysteria against the Affordable Care Act without bothering to learn how the law worked. Working from the premise that Obamacare was a uniquely ill-designed law death panels! train wrecks! they easily persuaded themselves and much of the country that Republicans could write something vastly better.

Half a year of Republican-run government has systematically exposed the right-wing arguments against Obamacare as bad-faith rhetoric or outright fantasy. One small-business owner, who told the New York Times in 2012 that he opposed the law as something jammed down the publics throat, was re-interviewed this year. I cant even remember why I opposed it, he now says.

It is not surprising that only this year did the Affordable Care Act become popular. The laws unpopularity depended entirely on the existence of an imaginary alternative that was free of trade-offs. The populist fallacy that everybody can get better insurance for less money if only the government wasnt run by morons is seductive. Obamas wonkish explanations could not expose the fallacys hollowness. But the Republicans in power have proven excellent (if inadvertent) tutors.

Indeed, some of the most important subjects of the lesson have been the members of the governing party themselves, many of whom never bothered to grapple with the policy before. The Republicans have spent the year desperately trying to pass a repeal, even in the face of staggering public disapproval for their efforts, because they cannot admit their entire case against Obamacare has been built on a lie. They cant accept theyve been promising something that is undeliverable and a bad idea for seven years, a well-connected former Republican aide told a reporter.

Despite the utter certainty by critics that Obamacare would cause a price spiral, medical inflation has registered at the lowest level in half a century. Insurers on the exchanges have mostly stabilized their coverage pools at profitable levels. (The exceptions are rural markets, which have always struggled to maintain economies of scale.) The remaining struggles the law has faced are overwhelmingly accounted for by administrative sabotage by hostile Republican politicians. Even in the face of a seven-year sabotage campaign, the law is delivering premiums at the levels forecast by the Congressional Budget Office, with government spending well below the forecast.

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A similar story can be seen on climate change. Trumps decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement certainly slows and complicates the decarbonization trajectory that Obama had set. But some perspective is necessary. Obamas climate-change strategy linked together political and economic momentum both domestically and internationally. Domestically, green-energy subsidies created in the stimulus would drive innovation, and the easier it became more technologically feasible to bring down emissions, the more ambitious politicians would become. Internationally, American promises in Paris could help produce reciprocal agreements from other countries. And as the green-energy developmental path became more economical, developing economies like India and China would increase their willingness to take it.

Of the four pieces domestic politics and economics, and overseas politics and economics Trump has halted progress only on the first. The tax credits for wind and solar power from the stimulus in 2009 were quietly extended in 2015. The market, which makes investment decisions over decades-long time horizons, is treating Trumps energy revanchism as a blip.

Coal plants are continuing to shut down in 2017, and no new ones have opened. Even though Trump greenlighted the Keystone XL pipeline months ago with great fanfare, TransCanada has quietly still not decided if it plans to actually build it. The price of batteries continues to plummet from $1,000 a kilowatt-hour in 2010 to under $230 now, and falling. Cheaper electric batteries have brought electric cars to the cusp of economic parity with gasoline engines. Tesla, which is essentially a creation of the stimulus, is rolling out its Tesla 3 model and building massive new factories, while every domestic automaker is frantically competing in the electric car market, which all see as the future. Cheaper batteries are also expanding the potential for wind and solar to store and supply power when it isnt sunny or windy. Even in places like Minnesota, zero-carbon energy sources with storage will soon be as cheap as electricity supplied by natural gas.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has likewise come to see Trump as an aberration rather than a sea change in American climate policy. Despite fears that America could blow up the Paris agreement, other signatories have instead decided to wait out the White Houses erratic current occupant and continue their decarbonization paths. China is building the worlds largest carbon market. Global coal production has seen its largest drop ever. The electric car market is surging worldwide, causing analysts to dramatically recalibrate how rapidly battery-powered vehicles will spread. Just over the last year, Exxon raised its forecast of the 2040 electric vehicle market from 65 million to 100 million, and OPEC raised its forecastfrom 46 million to 266 million.

The questions around the politics of climate change concern how fast the world will decarbonize and how much damage from climate change it will sustain in the process. The overall direction is not at issue. It is already clear that Obamas legacy on climate change, from the green-energy investments in the stimulus to the diplomatic breakthrough in Paris, will long outlast whatever imprint Trump can leave behind.

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None of this is to say that we should not feel any concern about the threat posed by Trump. The threat is enormous, although the potential damage he could wreak through administrative incompetence almost surely dwarfs the scale of whatever he could do by design. The point is to stop equating the threat to the republic with the threat to Obamas legacy. The latter is holding up against the administrations assault even as decades of built-up norms of American government give way.

Trumps presidency so far has likewise put the lie to the notion that he exposed some fatal flaw in the Obama political coalition. Remember the heady predictions of a Trumpian America in the wake of the surprising, though historically narrow, election? Like [Andrew] Jacksons populism, were going to build an entirely new political movement, predicted Steve Bannon. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.

Nothing like this has happened. Even coasting on the crest of the Obama-era economic expansion, and having yet to face a crisis he did not create himself, Trumps approval rating sits in the 30s. Republicans hope only to extract as much policy value as they can from the administration before it collapses onto itself. Having won power by exploiting Hillary Clintons anomalous personal unpopularity, the Republicans domestic agenda is systematically alienating their own voters.

When the wreckage from this presidency is cleared away, there will be only one party that possesses a politically and substantively workable governing model. Trumps administration may have the power to destroy, but Obamas had the power to build.

This complex in the Rockaways was rebuilt and is clean, well-maintained, and safe.

Two senators, alongside Trump, will propose halving the rate over the next ten years.

After Kellys first 48 hours on the job, even Trump is on his best behavior for his new chief of staff.

She only reports real (a.k.a. positive) stories about the White House.

The civil-rights division is preparing to tackle discrimination against white people.

The Trump administration and Ed Butowsky, the conservative commentator at the center of a new lawsuit, cant seem to agree.

The tax reform ruse has been blown.

The newspaper didnt release the full transcript of this curious conversation with Trump, so Politico did.

Out of the spotlight, HHS secretary Tom Price has been busily dismantling regulations that hold his fellow physicians accountable for results.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved his appointment, 92 to 5.

Kelly Roberts is also a GOP donor and the mother of two reality-TV stars. Native Slovenian Melania Trump had a strong hand in the choice.

For a long time Dean Heller looked likely to thwart his partys drive for health-care legislation. Then he flipped back, but the GOP failed anyway.

Hawaiis Mazie Hirono on the ongoing health-care fight, the fumbling Trump administration, and John McCains dramatic 11th-hour vote.

The head of the Coast Guard has also come out against Trumps announced ban on transgender people in the military.

The problem with arguments against a Democratic litmus test on abortion is the habit of disrespectfully treating reproductive rights as disposable.

How paranoia took over the Republican Party.

He also addressed those Dancing With the Stars rumors.

Bill Shine, who was accused of abetting Roger Ailess sexual harassment, may soon have a job in White House communications.

The leader is defiant over his controversial vote as two opposition leaders are reportedly arrested.

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Obama's Legacy Is Finally Coming Into Focus, Thanks to Trump - New York Magazine