The Angle

The Angle: Kakistocracy Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on Mike Flynn, Jeff Sessions, and government by the worst.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., talks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol on June 10, 2014.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Alert: Fred Kaplan looks at the intelligence community’s opinion of Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser, and finds a lot that should make us nervous. To his colleagues, Flynn’s recent erratic tweets don’t just show scary levels of prejudice against Muslims—they are also evidence of what Kaplan terms a terrifying “analytical shallowness.”

Alert alert: Jeff Sessions as attorney general would be an unmitigated civil rights disaster, Mark Joseph Stern writes. He’s shown himself hostile, time and again, to the claims of minorities and women looking for protection from the federal government.

Kakistocracy now: Jamelle Bouie wonders what it will be like to be governed by the worst among us.

Coulda woulda: Here are a few things Trump could do right now to unite us, Walter Dellinger writes: Investigate election interference from Russia and the FBI. Investigate voter suppression. Call for a vote on Merrick Garland. (He won’t! But he should.)

Perfect: Kenneth Lonergan’s new movie, Manchester by the Sea, is a gem, Dana Stevens writes—a film that seems to “contain all of life within it, like a ship in a bottle.” It’s also Casey Affleck’s best work so far.

For fun: 12 onscreen relationships utterly wrecked by a man’s novel.

So many Jack Torrances,

Rebecca

P.S. Help us fight the kakistocrats. Sign up for Slate Plus.