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    A Tourist From New Mexico Is Killed by an Elephant in Zambia

    The incident came months after another tourist was killed in Zambia when an elephant charged her group. One wildlife expert said the attacks were most likely “freak accidents.”A tourist from New Mexico was killed in Zambia when an elephant charged her, according to the police commissioner who investigated the incident. She is the second tourist to be fatally attacked by an elephant in the southern African country this year.The woman who was killed, Juliana G. Letourneau, 64, of Albuquerque, had just visited Victoria Falls, a 350-foot waterfall that straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and was heading back to her hotel on Wednesday when the group that she was traveling with encountered a herd of elephants on the road.She and others stepped out of their vehicle to observe the animals, said Auxensio Daka, the police commissioner for the southern province of Zambia, in a telephone interview on Saturday.“They stopped to watch the elephants, and unfortunately one of them charged towards them as they were standing there watching,” Mr. Daka said.Mr. Daka said that Ms. Letourneau was taken to a clinic in Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park near Livingstone, Zambia, where she was declared dead on arrival. Her injuries included deep wounds on the right shoulder blade and forehead, a fractured left ankle and a slightly depressed chest, according to a police statement.No other injuries were reported from the encounter with the elephant.Ms. Letourneau’s brother said on Saturday that he had no details about the incident, and declined to be interviewed. Other relatives could not be reached.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Analyze This: Donald Trump’s Thoughts and Speech

    More from our inbox:Illegal, Nah. Let’s Call It ‘Aspirational.’Biden’s RatingsDog Parks: Fun or Harmful?Together, With Music Chris W. KimTo the Editor:Re “Donald Trump’s Way of Speaking Defies All Logic,” by Michael Wolff (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 6):Mr. Wolff argues persuasively that much of what Donald Trump says can be chalked up to illogical and thus legally inconsequential blather and bluster. Except that is true only when one evaluates the former president’s pronouncements individually. Taken in their totality, they reveal themselves as the opposite of random scattershot.Virtually everything Mr. Trump has said in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election pushes in the same direction: to try to reverse the election by every legal and — failing that — illegal means conceivable. Thus, the route to defeating Mr. Trump’s “my words are meaningless” defense is to assemble them into their coherent and sinisterly subversive whole meaning.Richard ScloveAmherst, Mass.To the Editor:Michael Wolff’s depiction of Donald Trump’s language and thinking as disordered rings true after years of hearing and reading the former president’s communications. However, Mr. Wolff’s argument that Mr. Trump’s actions regarding the 2020 election were likely unwitting and that this may mitigate his guilt in a trial brings to mind the old punchline, “I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.” That is, chaotic thinking does not preclude intention.Reports of the former president’s caution and calculation abound. He famously doesn’t use email, typically issued questionable orders to subordinates using oblique language, and tore up, even flushed, papers in a White House toilet. His speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 contains a number of examples of indirect language.Even if Mr. Trump’s actions in the Jan. 6 case were based on an irrational belief, is that a viable defense? If it were, it might apply to many convicted criminals who truly believed they could commit a crime and get away with it.Madeleine CrummerSanta Fe, N.M.To the Editor:Wait a minute now. Since when does a liar’s sincere belief in his own lies excuse him from committing a crime?There are legal and illegal ways to pursue a grievance. The question is not whether the accused sincerely believes he was wronged but whether he was able to distinguish right actions from wrong ones.Donald Trump chose legitimate challenges to the outcome of the 2020 election through ballot challenges and recounts. But at every turn, despite the expert opinion of many of his own advisers and loss after loss in the courts, Mr. Trump went further and pursued illegal means of reversing the vote.If after November 2020 he was not a reasonable person and unable to tell right from wrong, he should try his luck with an insanity defense.John Mark HansenChicagoThe writer is a political science professor at the University of Chicago.Illegal, Nah. Let’s Call It ‘Aspirational.’Jordan Gale for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Lawyer Describes the Effort to Overturn the 2020 Election as ‘Aspirational’” (news article, Aug. 7):Donald Trump’s attorney John F. Lauro has claimed that Mr. Trump’s requests to Vice President Mike Pence and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, were not illegal because they were “aspirational,” which is to say they spoke to a hope rather than a plan.In an interview on CNN he stated: “What President Trump didn’t do is direct Vice President Pence to do anything. He asked him in an aspirational way.”By the same token, I presume that if I asked someone to cooperate with me in robbing a bank, that too wouldn’t be part of a criminal conspiracy, because my request was merely “aspirational.”David P. BarashGoleta, Calif.Biden’s RatingsPresident Biden has sought to claim credit for improvements in the economy by branding the disparate elements of his agenda “Bidenomics” and by embarking on a barnstorming tour of the country.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, but So Far Not Biden’s” (news analysis, Aug. 5):President Biden’s weak approval ratings despite his administration’s accomplishments result from a combination of his age, his inability to forcefully tout his achievements, the generalized contempt for politicians of all stripes and the successful orchestrated campaign by his opponents to paint him as weak and ineffectual.Should Donald Trump win the White House next year, the country will have given credence to the adage that people get the governments they deserve. We will have brought upon ourselves whatever calamities a second Trump administration would deliver.Daniel R. MartinHartsdale, N.Y.Dog Parks: Fun or Harmful? Joohee YoonTo the Editor:Re “Dog Parks Are Great for People. Too Bad They’re Terrible for Dogs,” by Julie V. Iovine (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Aug. 6):Ms. Iovine makes the unfortunate logical leap that because dog parks may be inappropriate environments for some dogs, all owners should “forgo the dog park.”For breeds like labradors (a breed that Ms. Iovine and I share affection for), dog parks can be the only place to safely or legally engage in instinctive pursuit and fetching behavior in an urban environment.We should no more prescribe an end to dog parks because some dogs do not enjoy them than we should eliminate the symphony because some people do not enjoy Mahler.Brian ErlyDenverTo the Editor:People should know about the risks related to dog parks and then decide accordingly if they feel comfortable about them. Just as with most things, from riding in airplanes to eating street food, some of us are more risk averse than others.Consider a few things: Do you have pet insurance? (Often, the other person cannot or will not pay for any vet bills if their dog injures yours.) Are your dogs more confident or nervous? Do you know the signs of anxiety and aggression in dogs? Are you willing to watch your dogs and stay with them to make sure they are safe? Is your dog a bully (a hard one to admit)?One of our dogs was attacked this year at a park, and the other dog’s guardian didn’t pay the vet bills for the stitches and follow-up visits. We still go back, but now with an air horn and an extra sense of vigilance.Katie ArthVentura, Calif.Together, With Music Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Jeff SevierTo the Editor:Re “This Is the Music America Needs,” by Farah Stockman (Opinion, Aug. 9):Ms. Stockman’s wonderful article reminded me of my childhood, when we came to these shores in 1938 as refugees from Nazi Germany. My father, a fine amateur violinist and an avid chamber music player, discovered a small publication that listed amateur musicians and their self-grades as to ability.This brought a diverse assortment of talented musicians, violin and cello cases in tow, to our apartment. They were young and elderly, newly arrived as well as true Yankees, Black and white, with diverse backgrounds and beliefs, all connected by the joy of making music together, playing Mozart and Haydn quartets.The after-music “Kaffee und Kuchen” (“coffee and cake”) provided by my mother encouraged conversation and discovery about each other’s lives, and a good deal of laughter and fellowship. Although small in number, these groups echoed the headline, “This (Too) Is the Music America Needs.”Rudi WolffNew York More

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    Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination

    Throughout his life — in his overlapping business, TV and political careers — Donald Trump has attempted to portray himself as what is conventionally known as an “alpha male.” But now he has run into a buzz saw of criminal investigations and civil suits that threaten to reveal both the ludicrousness of his self-image and his failure to meet the traditional standards of leadership.This does not diminish the seriousness of the threat he poses to American democracy.As both a candidate and as president, Trump has repeatedly made grandiose claims. Perhaps the best recent example came during his speech at a March 25 campaign rally in Waco, Texas: “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump told his supporters. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, described one way of looking at Trump in an email:Trump is a cartoon of an alpha-male wannabe, including the ruff of hair to exaggerate his height, his oversize phallic necktie, his defensiveness about the size of his hands and boast about the size of his genitals, his exaggeration of his height in his official biography, his looming behind Hillary Clinton during their presidential debate; his bizarre objection to her taking, like most of the other debate participants, a mid-debate break (“I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said, “No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting”) and his hair-trigger reaction to sleights and challenges.Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, sees Trump a bit differently, writing by email:Trump’s behavior in office — from his aggressive morning tweets to the Cabinet meetings he held in which obsequious beta males, like the vice president and attorney general, engaged in elaborate rituals of submission in the presence of their alpha — mirrors closely the tactics of domination and intimidation exhibited by alpha chimps in chimpanzee colonies. More than any other American president in memory, and like Putin and Orban, Trump exhibits what evolutionary social psychologists call “dominance” leadership, which is an evolved tendency (tracing back at least 5-7 million years in human prehistory) to attain status and exert influence in groups through brute force and intimidation.Trump’s bid for dominance has never, however, produced majority support. His unfavorable ratings remained consistently higher than his favorable ratings throughout his presidency and afterward, according to RealClearPolitics, and remain so to this day.Let’s put this approach to the Trump phenomenon into a larger context, starting with the work of Amar Sarkar and Richard Wrangham, both of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Sarkar and Wrangham are the authors of the March article “Evolutionary and Neuroendocrine Foundations of Human Aggression.”“Socio-cognitive advances in the mid-Pleistocene (781,000 years to 126,000 years ago),” they write, “are hypothesized to have enabled lower-ranking males to form alliances that effectively controlled coercive alpha males.”Sarkar and Wrangham are describing the crucial evolutionary role of coalition formation to overcome the power of “coercive alpha males.” So-called sub-elite males, according to them, had the ability to form coalitions in order to inflict “capital punishment and targeted conspiratorial killing” that would overcome “individuals who persistently or egregiously violate social norms.”At that point, Sarkar and Wrangham observe that “a physically formidable coercive alpha male was nonetheless vulnerable to less formidable sub-elite males who possessed sufficient cognitive capacity to form an alliance to kill the alpha male.”Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, contended in his 2001 book, “Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior,” that these prehistoric developments are actually tracing “the roots of democracy.”Boehm’s main hypothesis is that “the collective weapon of the rank and file has been their ability to define their own social life in moral terms, and to back up their thoughts about political parity with pointed actions in the form of collectivized social sanctioning.”Boehm goes on: “The ‘democratic’ origins I describe are not recent and historical, but evolutionary and ancient. They date well back in the Paleolithic era and were intimately involved with the development of human nature itself.”In effect, Sarkar, Wrangham and Boehm are describing an early stage of what over time has become an essential ingredient of a civilized, ordered society: the acquisition by the state of police power and the legal use of force to enforce norms and laws.In an email, Sarkar put it this way: “Humans appear to have inherited the capacity to coordinate with one another to enact violence.” While chimpanzees also demonstrate this capacity, according to Sarkar, “one factor that contributes to the uniqueness of human violence is the ability to use language, which allows individuals to freely share thoughts and intentions with one another and to form remarkably precise plans. This means that humans are able to engage in much higher levels of coordination in planning and performing aggression.”Sarkar added that it is “very difficult — or impossible — to connect the evolutionary origins of aggression to contemporary political events.”In their article, Sarkar and Wrangham continue the argument:For coalitionary proactive aggression against a formidable alpha male to be adaptive, it was critical for sub-elite males to ensure that their alliance was stable and that the execution could be performed at minimal risk to alliance members. Only then could they act safely without retribution from the alpha male or his sycophants.This shift of authority and control away from abusive, domineering individual males to collective groups of less powerful men and women had substantial consequences for the composition of society, then and now:Alpha alliances of sub-elite males could kill coercive alpha males, drastically reducing the reproductive success of coercive alpha males. Such control would also have signaled the limits of acceptable intragroup aggression. The direction of selection on male aggression thus changed as a result: rather than selection favoring coercive behavior that males used to achieve and maintain alpha status, the actions of alpha alliances ensured that selection acted against it. Simultaneously, the necessity of coordination and cooperation for targeted conspiratorial killing of alpha males meant that selection favored proactive aggression, and especially coalitionary proactive aggression.The result: “Individual alpha males were thus replaced by alpha alliances of subelite males.”In a separate 2019 article, Wrangham argues:The explanation that best accounts for a novel selection pressure leading to a reduction in reactive aggression starting around 300,000 years ago is the emergence of collective intentionality in the form of language-based conspiracy. The evolution of this newly sophisticated cognitive ability would have led subordinates to socially select against aggressive fighters, creating a reverse dominance hierarchy. The spread of the new style of hierarchy could have occurred by individual learning or by selection of group-cultures, and would have paved the way for diverse selection pressures to additionally influence the evolution of the characteristically human social traits.Where does all this fit in with the state of politics today?The barrage of criminal investigations and civil suits against Trump is, in many respects, the sophisticated and complex way America’s democratic system of government has developed to constrain an ominous, and even somewhat delusional, deregulated “alpha-male wannabe.”Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, describes Trump in an email as “a unique case. He is a narcissist. He is not hungry for power. He wants attention and praise. So he has some alpha male traits, certainly, but he is not prototypical.”In his book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Haidt cites Boehm while making the case that the early acquisition of weaponry played a crucial role in the democratization of authority within groups of humans:Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between alpha males (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering.Once early humans had developed spears, Haidt continues,anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations, then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.Over time, the aversion to bullying males developed into what Haidt calls “the liberty/oppression moral foundation,” which, he proposes,evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance.The liberty foundation, Haidt goes on to say,supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”Pinker argued by email that over the long haul,History has seen the invention of increasingly complex systems that limit the power of the leader, such as coalitions (as per Sarkar and Wrangham), power-sharing or turn-taking agreements, parliaments, constitutions, and rule-governed bureaucracies. Our leader is called a “president” because he merely presides over the government, rather than ruling over it.But, Pinker cautioned,We’re always in danger of slipping back into the dynamic of dominance. In democracies, voters, on average, favor the taller candidate and often crave a “strong leader.” Presidents and prime ministers, for their part, often arrogate more power than the constitution allows. The system of laws that constrains the leader’s power is often tested to its limits, and in countries that are not democracies, their only hope may be what Sarkar and Wrangham call an “alpha coalition,” namely the coup-plotters that many of us hope might someday depose Putin.Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown whose research has focused in part on the biological and genetic bases of political behavior, provided further explanation in an email: “Humans show self-domestication over time — they become more peaceful — and that may seem like it is not true in light of all the violence in the world, but relative to the death rates in earlier hunter-gatherer kinds of nomadic communities, it is true.”This process of self-domestication, she continued,happens as groups of beta and gamma males (the less strong ones) work together to unseat alphas who exploit the community. They might ostracize him (the alpha male) but mostly they assassinate him. What that means is that slowly over time you get more egalitarian dynamics (such as the birth of democracy, for example).In the case of the former president, McDermott wrote:Trump is a poster child for a “coercive alpha male” and frankly I have been surprised that more Republicans don’t try to take him on directly. I think part of it is that other potential Republican leaders are so narcissistic that they cannot band together in the kind of coalition that historically would have brought down a leader like this in one way or another. This depends on coalitional dynamics: men working together in cooperation, not against each other.Democratic norms, according to McDermott,are one way the country has tried to constrain the negative effects of Trump through things like rule of law and elections (Biden won in 2020). But they have not been as strong as many would like or hope for, and I agree that this is partly (although not entirely) related to increasing polarization (i.e. the inability to form strong united coalitional bonds).As far as “coercive alpha males” go, Trump is a bully, as demonstrated by his treatment both of competitors for the nomination in 2016 and of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida now; he boasts of his predatory sexual activity; and he lacks empathy, as reflected in his policies separating the children of detained immigrants from their parents at the border.As the same time, Trump has a long and detailed history of violating the fundamental obligations of a true leader. He is both unreliable and a liar, repeatedly failing to pay bills for services, products and construction; defrauding students who paid to learn about real estate; distorting the truth repeatedly and extensively, about everything from President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the size of his inauguration crowd all the way on through to the results of the 2020 election; promising to “drain the swamp” only to preside over an administration rife with self-dealing.On top of all that, Trump is often simply preposterous, more a late-night TV subject of ridicule, lacking character and the observable qualities of a credible leader, crude more than calculating, a con artist, huckster and hustler.Even so, there are a large number of people who are not persuaded by Wrangham’s line of thinking. John Horgan, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he serves as director of the Stevens Center for Science Writings, emailed his response to my inquiry:I have a meta-objection to Wrangham’s use of biology to explain modern social behavior. It’s far too deterministic, it lets us off the hook, it reduces our autonomy. When Wrangham’s ideas seep into popular culture, they feed into peoples’ fatalism about hierarchies, inequality and militarism.R. Brian Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, responded to my inquiry regarding the Sarkar-Wrangham paper by first acknowledging:I come from a very critical position. One foundational difference in perspectives is that my new book, “Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?” is intended to refute current primatological consensus that chimpanzees have evolved propensities to “proactively” kill neighbors.Ferguson continued:I have been deeply involved in understanding war, conflict, and politics in tribal societies, and I do not recognize anything like their idea of alphas facing death because of sub-alpha elite coalitions, except in the notable category of segmental tributary chiefdoms and states, where there are rivals near the top ready to rebel, and usually then take over.McAdams, the professor of psychology at Northwestern, does not share Horgan and Ferguson’s doubts about Wrangham. In an essay written in the first year of the Trump presidency, “The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J. Trump,” Ferguson argued along lines similar to Pinker’s:If angry extraversion and disagreeableness characterize his temperament style, narcissism captures Trump’s underlying motivational agenda. Although some dominant leaders subscribe to an overarching set of values and goals, Trump has no political philosophy to speak of, and his central goal in life is, and always has been, to promote himself. In Trump’s case, narcissism seems to play well with the authoritarian dynamic.Trump, McAdams continues, “harkens back to an older evolutionarily paradigm for achieving status in primate groups. It is the paradigm of brute dominance, an atavistic proclivity whose primal appeal never seems to fade.”Why, McAdams asks, “did 63 million Americans elect a president of the United States who was repeatedly described during the campaign, by both Democrats and Republicans, as a serial liar, a sexual predator, a swindler, a narcissist and a bully?”He answers:No U.S. president in recent memory, and perhaps none ever, has tapped so effectively into the primal psychology of dominance. None has so effectively cultivated an authoritarian dynamic with his followers.In addition, according to McAdams:Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate.To some, Trump is less a cause than a symptom of the pervasive contemporary undermining of the American commitment to democratic values.Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, argued by email that there is no doubt that there has been a weakening of democratic norms and that this erosionhas loosened the constraints on what counts as behavioral red lines for political leaders. This is almost certainly true for “coercive alpha males,” but I think it is broader than that. As those norms decay there is simply more room available for a range of personalities to get their swagger on in the political arena, as it were, aggressively and openly seeking power to aggrandize themselves and punish those who stand in the way.Smith pointed out that there are no “gender limits here (think of Marjorie Taylor Greene).” In addition, in Smith’s view, the issue goes to the heart of “the corroding of what’s considered beyond the behavioral pale.”In a large heterogeneous republic like ours, Smith wrote, “it is not easy, it is not just a matter of having clear rules or laws, but establishing broad acceptance and respect for the process, something more in the realm of custom, tradition or folk intuition.” But “once established, those norms can help insulate democratic systems from what otherwise is a natural vulnerability to demagogues and tyrants.”Those norms, Smith continued,are incredibly hard to institutionalize, but unfortunately apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained “coercive alpha male behavior,” but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More