Despite all the lies and distortions, President Donald Trump has spent his first week in office assembling a coherent and well-planned framework for foreign policy. It is hiding in plain sight—frequently missed in the storm of tweets and the attacks on domestic enemies. Read as a whole and in detail, with attention to their larger single-minded purpose, Trump’s executive orders are the blueprints for the most significant shift in American foreign policy since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

The latest drafts of executive orders, several of which the president will reportedly sign Friday at the Pentagon, are bold and breathtaking in their reach. They are strategic and transformative. They are also poised to destroy the foundations for the last 70 years of American-led peace and prosperity. The orders question the very ideas of cooperation and democracy, embodying an aggressive commitment to “America First” above all else. So much for the “defense of the free world,” and the “march of freedom”—obvious soft-headed “loser” ideas for the new team of White House cynics.

President Trump has signed an executive order that temporarily suspends the U.S. refugee program and bars Syrian refugees. It will likely suspend immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries and bars the admission of anyone who engages in “acts of bigotry or hatred,” including “the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own.” It also allows the the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to jointly admit individuals on a case-by-case basis, “including when the person is a religious minority ... facing religious persecution.”

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Friday, Trump clarified what this means: Christians refugees will be given priority status. “They’ve been horribly treated,” the president said. “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.” People overseas “were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians,” he added, “so we are going to help them.”

Did you see the gif? The one that features Melania Trump, the newly installed first lady of the United States, radiantly smiling as her husband gazes upon her … and then, as he turns away, allowing the grin to melt into a frown? Grin-grimace, grin-grimace, grin-grimace, looping into eternity.

Call it a Kinsley gif: The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth—about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us. During a time of Much News, it quickly became conversation fodder. Slate offered “A Detailed Forensic Analysis of Melania Trump’s Creepy, Devastating Inauguration Smile/Frown.” Jezebel shared it with the sardonic declaration that “Melania Trump Definitely Loves Her Husband and Is Very Happy to Be Here.” New York magazine did a fact-check of the video the gif came from to assure us, finally, that “That Awkward Clip of Donald and Melania at the Inauguration Is Definitely Real.” (Snopes agreed, but warned that the video is inconclusive when it comes to its ability to reveal Melania’s emotions.) #FreeMelania trended.

In 2006, Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage.

“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.

Software developer Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz have collaborated on a number of projects that use technology to bring awareness to Jewish issues, history, and culture.

But last night they dreamt up the St. Louis Manifest, a Twitter project sharing the story of some 900 Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 on the MS St. Louis in an attempt to gain entry into the United States. After being turned way, the passengers were forced to return to Europe, where a number of countries accepted them as refugees; 254 of them were killed in the Holocaust. This story, Neiss and Schwartz believe, serves as a fitting tribute to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, and a reminder of a time in American history when the country closed its doors to refugees.

She owns a cookie store. He loves model trains. They both hate the Clintons. And beyond that, not much is clear about the motivations of the Mercer father-daughter duo of Republican megadonors who have become two of the most powerful people in the country over the last 18 months.

Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were among the earliest and strongest backers of Donald Trump while other elite donors still disdained him. It turned out to be a good investment. But now, with their favored candidate freshly installed as president of the United States, it remains unclear what they believe, or what they hope their investment will yield.

The Mercers have been a quiet but constant presence in the background of Republican politics since the beginning of the 2016 cycle. They started the campaign as backers of Ted Cruz, pouring millions into one of the main super PACs supporting his candidacy. Their data firm, Cambridge Analytica, was hired by the Cruz campaign. They switched to support Trump shortly after he clinched the nomination, and he eventually hired Cambridge Analytica, as well. Their top political guru is Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chairman and White House chief strategist. They’re close, too, with Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who also has a senior role in the White House. They never speak to the press and hardly ever even release a public statement. Like Trump himself, they’ve flouted the standard playbook for how things are done in politics.

When I first started talking to ISIS propagandists and supporters, I was much impressed by one of their favorite Koranic verses: “We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.” The verse is a reminder of God’s omnipresence, and his Santa Claus-like awareness of our deepest selves, our sins, and our good deeds. In time, I came to associate that unsettling proximity (He is closer than you think) not only with God, but also with ISIS. They too were less distant than they seemed. What seemed at first like a movement of barbarians with alien origins and impulses looked increasingly like a human phenomenon, with human flaws and virtues (mostly flaws). The more I investigated the group’s supporters, the more I found people who at one point had shared my culture and community, even if they tried to throw it all away in the service of something wicked. In the end I discovered that one of the most important figures in the Islamic State, a mysterious ideologue named Yahya Abu Hassan, was not Syrian or Iraqi at all, but a 33-year-old American, a dope-smoking theological prodigy from my own hometown.

It’s a little before 3 p.m. on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a stroller, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out—so where are all the kids?

Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was.

There’s a long history of using false claims of voter fraud to justify voter suppression. The practice has enjoyed a resurgence as of late, especially since the Supreme Court weakened federal oversight of voting laws in 2013, states like North Carolina and Texas have used trumped-up charges of voter fraud to implement voting laws and voter ID that have since been determined to be racially discriminatory.

These arguments exist within a tradition of using the specter of fraud to legally suppress votes on a racial basis. But for decades that tradition has relied on a wink and a nod—openly stating the discriminatory intent of laws that had the clear effect of disenfranchisement could be legally troublesome. The dog whistle is the key.