Tag: Trump

Categories
Politics

The candidates deliver their closing arguments

The closing minutes of the second and final presidential debate seemed to pack the entirety of the campaign into two minutes.

The setup came in a question from moderator Kristen Welker, who asked both President Trump and his rival Joe Biden what they would say in their inaugural address to Americans who did not vote for them.

Trump, who went first, did not answer the question. Instead he predicted that if the former vice president were elected, “you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen, your 401(k)s will go to hell, and it will be a very sad day for this country.”

When his turn came, Biden said he’d choose “science over fiction,” “hope over fear,” “deal with systemic racism,” ensure that “everyone has an even chance,” and create “millions” of new jobs in clean energy. The former vice president said he would represent all Americans “whether you voted for me or against me.”

The moment marked the last chance for each candidate to deliver a closing message to a national audience; the campaign equivalent of the final minutes of a soccer match when the sides scramble furiously to score.

Trump’s argument may be one of necessity: His concealing, dismissing, mismanaging and ultimately losing control of the pandemic has left him pointing to the stock market, which in the closing days of the campaign hovers at pre-pandemic levels, as a proxy for his performance.

That someone who played a successful businessperson on TV now clings to a financial market as a political life preserver brings its own irony. To the extent stocks have held their ground, they’ve done so thanks in part to a pandemic-induced lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. In another twist, the central bank’s chairman was, at least until COVID-19 arrived, a regular Trump target.

Though stocks might hold sway with some of the roughly one-third of Americans who have a 401(k) plan, there aren’t enough of them to reelect a president. Even in normal times, share prices are hardly a proxy for prosperity. And the times are anything but normal. More Americans lost their jobs in two months last spring than during the Great Depression and the recession of 2008 combined.

For his part, Biden, if you untangle the syntax, sought to unite. The economy matters there, too. The fault lines laid bare by the pandemic include widening inequality, which the pandemic threatens to accelerate without a Biden administration and its allies in Congress finding a way to rebuild a safety net that has frayed beyond repair.

In a New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month, 91% of likely Democratic voters said they support a new $2 trillion stimulus package to extend unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide financial support to state and local governments.

Predictably by now, the survey divided sharply on partisan lines. With one exception: The proposed stimulus also commanded support from a majority (56%) of likely Republican voters.

Whether measured in lives ended or upended, the pandemic’s toll grows by the day. The coming together that Biden is offering may be taking shape already.

Categories
News

The courts should take Trump at his word

As a candidate for president in 2015, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of the nation’s borders to Muslims. 

Two years later, President Trump signed an executive order enacting a ban on visitors from a series of Muslim-majority countries. Opponents sued, citing those statements as evidence that the ban was little more than a pretext for discrimination in violation of the Constitution. 

Fast forward to Friday, when Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S. border with Mexico. The maneuver enables the White House to build a wall that Congress had just refused to fund in full. Candidate Trump promised his supporters a wall, which is likely to be a cornerstone of his campaign for reelection in 2020.

In support of its argument, the White House said the declaration marks a step “to stop crime and drugs from flooding into our nation.” 

Yet in the Rose Garden on Friday, Trump himself seemed to undermine his own argument. “I didn’t need to do this,” he told reporters. “But I’d rather do it much faster.”

Late Friday, both the governor of California and the American Civil Liberties Union said they would sue the administration to overturn the emergency. Both are likely to point to the president’s words as evidence that the arguments propounded in support of the emergency have nothing to do with facts. Data compiled by the Department of Homeland Security show no evidence of a flood of illegal crossings at the border. 

Trump predicted that the declaration would be challenged in court. And that the administration could expect “a fair shake” at the Supreme Court, where conservatives, two of whom Trump appointed, constitute a majority. 

There has been little litigation over the 1976 statute that the administration cited in support of its declaration. 

The reality – as the president himself suggested by his statements – appears to be that he needs to show supporters between now and November 2020 that he upheld his promise to build a wall.  Now Trump’s words are the words of a president. The Rose Garden is not the campaign trail. 

In a 5-4 decision last year upholding the travel ban, the majority looked away from the statements by candidate Trump. “[T]he issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. “It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority had ignored the facts. Its decision, she wrote, “leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete’ shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.”

Categories
News

Disinvited

Eight years ago, I attended the opening of the New Yorker Festival. The program, which was held at the Frank Gehry-designed headquarters of IAC, on Manhattan’s West Side, featured a conversation between one of the magazine’s staff writers, and, I recall, some star in the field of creating effects for movies.

Though my memory of the event has faded, I remember the strangeness that I felt milling about the reception, where guests, who had purchased tickets, mingled with one another and with reporters from the magazine.

Across the room, I spied Ken Auletta, a writer who covers the media for the magazine, with his hands in his pockets, speaking to no one. I wondered whether he and his colleagues felt an obligation to mingle. Though I didn’t ask him, I wondered whether he had been conscripted to put on a show.

I am reminded of that feeling in the wake of the dustup over The New Yorker’s disinviting Steve Bannon from this year’s festival. The invitation to Bannon, a hero of the alt-right and the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, had been extended by David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, who wrote to Bannon that the magazine “would be honored” to have him as headliner.

Bannon accepted. The plan was for Remnick to interview him on stage. “I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Remnick told the Times.

But the plan went awry. Actor Jim Carrey, comedians Patton Oswalt and John Mullaney, and director Judd Apatow all threatened to back out of the festival if Bannon appeared. Kathryn Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the magazine, tweeted that she was “beyond appalled” by the prospect of Bannon as headliner.

“I don’t think an advocate for ISIS would have been invited to the Festival,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, another staff writer. “I don’t think a literal Klansman would’ve.”

The backlash forced Remnick to reverse course. “The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him,” Remnick wrote on Monday. “Some members of the staff, too, reached out to say that they objected to the invitation, particularly the forum of the festival.”

The decision did not sit well with Bannon, who called Remnick “gutless” for withdrawing the invitation. The move also elicited criticism from some writers at the magazine.

“Journalism is about hearing opposing views,” tweeted Lawrence Wright. “I regret that this event is not taking place.” Malcolm Gladwell noted that shining a light on views we may abhor can transform a platform into a “gallows.”

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi also blasted Remnick. “You just removed, from the interview stage, one of the few people in the country that a) knows some of Donald Trump’s darkest secrets, and b) might have an inclination to talk about them,” he complained.

The varying views seem to turn on whether you think the festival is journalism, as Gladwell, Wright and Taibbi all seem to, or a forum for the sharing of ideas, as the critics contend.

A few observers zeroed in on the tension. “The issue, it seems, is the blurry line between content produced by news organizations (i.e., journalists) and live events hosted by the same outlets,” wrote Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz.

Zack Beauchamp, writing at Vox, explained the challenge for news organizations in straddling moneymaking events such as the New Yorker Festival:

“These kinds of events are, by their very nature, difficult to manage. They need to be attractive to audiences, which means booking interesting and/or controversial speakers. The events need the speakers to show up, which often means paying them, and they might not want to walk into the lion’s den of an adversarial interview in front of a live audience.

At the same time, the interviews themselves can’t betray the core journalistic mission of the publication — they can’t somehow do reporting and brand promotion at the same time. That means the journalists onstage shouldn’t (in theory) just suck up to the speakers and sing their praises — though that’s all too often what happens — but rather should respectfully challenge their ideas and arguments.”

That, I suspect, was the idea of inviting Bannon to headline the festival. Remnick had every intention of challenging Bannon. But the forum just didn’t work, as Remnick noted when he explained to the staff that the interview would find its place in the pages of the magazine, where the journalism takes priority.

I see it both ways. Part of what has allowed me to sharpen my critique of Bannon is listening to him in interviews or reading his words. In March, I watched an interview that he did with Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times.

During the conversation, Bannon admitted to being fascinated with Mussolini (he previously praised the dictator’s virility and fashion sense), glossing over Il Duce’s description of Jews as a people destined to be wiped out completely, let alone the destruction he wreaked on Italy.

In August, New York magazine published an interview with Bannon, who asserted that the financial crisis paved the way for Donald Trump.

“He’s the first guy to tell the Establishment to go fuck themselves,” said Bannon. “And we’re just in the beginning stages, and that’s why right-wing populism’s gonna win, because the left wing, you’re a bunch of pussies. The Democratic Party is owned and paid for by Wall Street.”

To be sure, the financial crisis fueled misery on both the left and right. And that some of the resentment that followed found its footing in support for Trump. But if a president who signs a tax cut worth $150 billion a year isn’t “owned and paid for by Wall Street,” I don’t know who is.

To me, the surest way to see the holes in Bannon’s theories is to hold them up for scrutiny and challenge. But I also appreciate that my experience differs from that of a person of color. As Damon Young at Very Smart Brothas writes:

“Decision makers at large, mainstream publications and platforms keep inviting and providing space for men like Bannon and Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, as if the things they have to say are riveting and engrossing, as if any novel insights can be gained from handing them the spotlight… A dive into the thoughts and inclinations and sensibilities of openly bigoted white men isn’t just old hat. It’s America’s oldest hat. Need to ask Steve Bannon about his racism and xenophobia? OK. While you’re at it, exhume Christopher fucking Columbus’ corpse to ask about the lunch menu on the Santa Maria.”

Young doesn’t need to hear more. At least not in a forum that celebrates a sharing of ideas. He knows the thing. He lives it.

Margaret Sullivan, who covers media for the Washington Post, echoed the concern, calling inviting Bannon a “lousy idea.” “There is nothing more to learn from Bannon about his particular brand of populism, with its blatant overlay of white supremacy,” she wrote. (In March, Bannon told Marine Le Pen, the right-wing politician in France, to wear her racism like a “badge of honor.”)

In his message on Monday, Remick elaborated on his reversal. “I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind,” he wrote.

To Bannon the capacity for reflection signals a lack of guts. But Remnick’s decision to disinvite Bannon reflects something that we don’t see every day in public and never from the president whom Bannon helped to elect: A willingness to change one’s mind based on facts.

Categories
Law Politics

The Nunes memo shows why context matters

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a memo on Friday that they contend undercuts the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The three-and-a-half-page memo, written by GOP congressional aides, faults the FBI for allegedly duping a federal judge into authorizing surveillance of Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, based on material paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The memo, which Republicans promoted via social media with a  campaign of #releasethememo, asserts that by relying on information procured by a political operative who was hired by Democrats, the FBI revealed a bias against Trump or, at the very least, allowed itself to be manipulated by Democratic propaganda.

The campaign, of which the memo forms part, aims to discredit a probe by special counsel Robert Mueller, whom the deputy attorney general appointed to lead the investigation. It aims to persuade Americans who may otherwise be too busy earning a living or simply living their lives to investigate all the facts of an anti-Trump bias at the highest levels of the Justice Department.

But the memo tells only part of the story. The document, which was published at the behest of Rep. Devin Nunes, the Intelligence Committee chairman, cherry-picks information to reach a conclusion that the investigators are biased against the president. That has allowed the president, who may be a target of the Russia investigation, to assert that the memo “totally vindicates” him, , as he tweeted on Saturday. (As it happens, Trump also approved the release of the memo.)

Here are some of the main ways that the memo may mislead readers:

The Nunes memo contends that the government’s case for a warrant relied solely on a report written by a paid political operative.

According to the memo, a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a private investigator, on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, “formed an essential part” of the FBI’s application for a warrant to subject Page to surveillance starting in October 2016. But the memo fails to note that the FBI interviewed Page in 2013, as part of an investigation into possible efforts by Russia to recruit him as a spy.  That was the same year Page bragged about being an adviser to the Kremlin.

“The FBI had good reason to be concerned about Carter Page and would have been derelict in its responsibility to protect the country had it not sought a FISA warrant,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement released on Friday.

What’s more, the Justice Department, which applied for the warrant on behalf of the FBI, told the court that information gleaned from material compiled by a paid political operative formed part of the application, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. So, contrary to the suggestion of the Nunes memo, DOJ did not mislead the court about the source of some of the information that informed its application for a warrant.

Note that the first researchers to investigate possible Trump ties to Russia were not hired by Hillary Clinton or a Democrat for that matter. They were paid by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by Paul Singer, a hedge fund titan who backed a White House bid by Republican Senator Marco Rubio and who continued to fund efforts to block Trump from receiving the nomination even after Rubio dropped out of the race.

In May 2016, Rubio instructed Fusion GPS, the firm that later outsourced some of the work to Steele, to stop doing research on Trump after it became apparent that Trump would clinch the nomination. After Trump earned the nomination, Fusion was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to gather information about Trump. Fusion GPS then hired Steele to investigate possible ties.

“The basis [for hiring Steele] was [Trump] made a number of trips to Russia and talked about doing a number of business deals but never did one, and that struck me as a little bit odd and calling for an explanation,” Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of Fusion GPS, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August.

The memo contends that, without the information from Steele, the FBI would not have sought a warrant to eavesdrop on Page.

According to the Nunes memo, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified before the Intelligence Committee in December that no warrant would have been sought “without the Steele dossier information.”

The application for the warrant remains classified, so we cannot know what the government argued to the court. But Rep. Schiff has accused House Republicans of omitting from their memo what McCabe told the Intelligence Committee about the origins of the investigation.

Of course, as chairman of the committee, Nunes can order the release of McCabe’s testimony, so we all could know what he said. But Nunes has neither authorized release of the testimony nor suggested that he might do so.

The FBI allegedly abused its authority by applying to the FISA court to surveil a U.S. citizen.

 The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), signed into law in 1978, authorizes the government to eavesdrop on Americans who officials reasonably believe to “engage in clandestine intelligence activities in the United States contrary to the interests of the United States” on behalf of a foreign power.

To authorize such surveillance, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must agree there is reason to believe the target knowingly engaged in such activities or is knowingly aiding or conspiring with someone else who is doing so.

Steele maintained contact with Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ lawyer whose wife worked for the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier.

The Nunes memo notes that Steele kept up contact with Bruce Ohr, who at the time served in a senior capacity at DOJ, where he advised both Sally Yates, the acting attorney general appointed by President Obama and later fired by President Trump, and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, whom Trump appointed.

According to the memo, Steele stated to Ohr the former’s aim that Trump not be elected president – a bias that Ohr noted. At the same time, Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS, which, as noted, commissioned the Steele dossier. The Nunes memo charges that the Ohrs’ relationships with both Steele and Fusion GPS were omitted from the application for a FISA warrant.

But as the Times has reported, there is no evidence that’s been made public that suggests Ohr, who handles narcotics investigations, played any role in the application for the warrant. As Josh Gerstein, who covers the White House for Politico notes, “the fact that Ohr reported Steele’s comments – that he was intent on preventing Trump from becoming president – to the FBI undercuts the notion that Ohr was a raging partisan.”

Here again, if Nunes has information that undermines that reporting or suggests that Ohr did, in fact, bias the application against Trump, he alone has the authority to release it.

The Nunes memo charges that the government relied in its application for a warrant on an article published in Yahoo News that was sourced from Steele himself.

According to House Republicans, the article, which the government cited in its application for a warrant, does not corroborate the Steele dossier because the reporting that informed the article was leaked from Steele himself.

But as David Kris, a FISA expert who led DOJ’s national security division for two years ending in 2011, told the Washington Post, it’s more likely the government cited the article “to show that the investigation had become public and that the target [Page] therefore might take steps to destroy evidence or cover his tracks.”

Rep. Schiff called the Republicans’ citing portrayal of the Yahoo News article “a serious mischaracterization.”

The FISA warrant was based on information that could not be verified.

By law, applications to the FISA court are secret in order to protect national security information. Thus, we cannot know what information the government’s application to eavesdrop on Steele contained. But as Charlie Savage has explained in the Times:

“According to several former officials, a typical application ranges from 30 to 100 pages and centers on a factual affidavit by a senior F.B.I. agent working on the investigation at headquarters, which in turn compiles information submitted by other agents in the field. This document primarily explains what evidence the bureau has gathered to establish that a target is probably a foreign agent.

A typical application would also include a legal memorandum by a career Justice Department intelligence lawyer; a certification explaining the purpose and necessity of the requested surveillance and signed by the F.B.I. director; and approval for the broader package signed by a senior, Senate-confirmed Justice Department official — the attorney general, the deputy attorney general or the head of the National Security Division.

Occasionally the package may be supplemented with other materials. For example, it may include a news article to show that an investigation has become public knowledge, which could make it more likely that a target is taking steps to conceal his activities.”

Though the application remains classified, there is no evidence to suggest that the government could have hoped to persuade the court to issue a warrant based on evidence that lacked a reasonable basis. The 11 judges who sit on the FISA court are federal district court judges who are designated by the Chief Justice of the United States.

The government claimed, without basis, a connection between Page and Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

According to the Nunes memo, the application for a warrant to surveil Page mentions information regarding George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who in October pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his relationship with a professor who claimed to have connections with senior officials in the Russian government who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.

The Nunes memo criticizes DOJ for including Papadopoulos in its application for a warrant, noting “there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos.” But, as Rep. Schiff noted on Friday, that misstates why the FBI included the information about Papadopoulos in the warrant application.

“The DOJ appropriately provided the court with a comprehensive explanation of Russia’s election interference, including evidence that Russian agents courted another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos,” Schiff noted. As we know from the guilty plea by Papadopoulos, he relayed those efforts to senior officials in the Trump campaign.

Senior DOJ officials renewed the warrant application on at least three occasions even though they knew the Steele dossier lacked credibility.

The Nunes memo says that Yates, McCabe and James Comey, the former FBI director, applied on three occasions to renew the warrant to eavesdrop on Page despite questions about the validity of the Steele dossier. That, suggests House Republicans, shows anti-Trump bias among senior DOJ officials.

But the assertion overlooks a reality of the process for renewing a FISA warrant, which is that every 90 days, the government must show the court that agents are obtaining information through the warrant that is consistent with the original application and that justifies a renewal. In short, the court expects a progress report each time the government asks it to renew the warrant. After the initial grant of the warrant, the basis for extending it cannot be hypothetical.

What’s more, Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, and Dana Boente, who served as acting attorney general after Trump fired Yates, also reviewed the information and signed off on the submissions to the FISA court.

Either DOJ misled the FISA court, or the court knew the alleged shortcomings in the evidence and approved the warrant anyway.

As the information above suggests, there is little to suggest that the government somehow persuaded the court into granting a warrant on the basis of the Steele dossier alone. Might the judge who granted the warrant have done so based on a misreading of the evidence or a desire to pursue a partisan investigation of the Trump administration?

Two realities suggest otherwise. First, the process for obtaining a FISA warrant is far more onerous than the Nunes memo suggests. As outlined above, the court issues a warrant based on a submission that includes an affidavit – a statement under oath – of one or more FBI agents. “We didn’t put in every fact, but we put in enough facts to allow the court to judge bias and motive and credibility of the sourcing,” Matthew Olsen, former deputy assistant attorney general for national security who oversaw the Justice Department’s FISA program from 2006 to 2009, told the Washington Post.

And were a judge to issue a warrant that lacked a reasonable basis, you can be sure the defendant in any prosecution that ensued would seek to suppress the evidence, as criminal defendants do whenever they have reason to think that the government obtained evidence illegally or without probable cause.

***

The Nunes memo gets something else wrong. Even if the FBI relied in part on information prepared by a political operative, the decision by the FISA court whether to issue a warrant depends on whether the government demonstrated a reasonable basis for concluding that Page might have knowingly conspired with a foreign government.

All of the information that might lead investigators to conclude that was the case, becomes relevant in that context. Of course, both the investigators and the court have an obligation to assess the credibility of the information. That matters more than its source.

As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes can release the testimony of McCabe along with any other information that he thinks would bolster his party’s assertion that the government has engaged in a partisan effort to discredit the president. So far, all we have is a memo that disregards the totality of information that constitutes the public record.

Categories
News

Trump weakens ties between the US and Africa

Among the billboards that greet passengers arriving at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport is an advertisement for the Bank of China, which is among that country’s largest state-owned financial institutions.

“Bridging China-Africa cooperation with tailor-made financial solutions,” the sign reads.

The message reminded me of a discussion about Donald Trump with my seatmate, a man from Namibia (or Nambia, as Trump called it) in his fifties, on a flight to Johannesburg from New York, a day after the president, during a meeting at the White House with lawmakers, reportedly disparaged immigrants from Africa and Haiti.

While Trump insults Africa, China reaches out.

Trump debases the presidency, we agreed, “and he doesn’t do anything for economic growth,” added my seatmate, who, as it happens, manages the port at Walvis Bay, one of the busiest ports in Africa.

The tonnage at the port ebbs and flows with trade. If you run a port, the more trade, the better.

I asked my seatmate how in his experience, the U.S. in Africa compares with China in Africa. “The Chinese are out to make money,” he said. “They want to have the world’s biggest economy.”

If that’s China’s goal, Trump is providing an assist. Add to his latest remarks the ways – from withdrawing the Paris climate agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership to embracing a travel ban that discriminates against Muslims – that Trump is isolating the U.S. at the same time as China ups its engagement with the world.

“To have insulted an entire continent in the most vile terms is manifestly harmful to our interests,” Reuben Brigety II, who was U.S. ambassador to the African Union from 2013 to 2015, told the Times.

The businessman who penned “The Art of the Deal” has yet to show he can be an opportunist when it comes to pursuing opportunities for anyone, including the U.S., besides himself. (Credit Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in a 2016 interview, called Trump “a faker.”)

En route to Johannesburg, I read “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the best-seller by Michael Wolff that claims to reveal the inside dope on the dysfunction that marked the administration’s first 100 days.

Commenting on what he terms the episodes of “ohmygodness” that emanate from Trump daily, “it is worth considering,” notes Wolff,” the possibility that this constant, daily often more than once-a-day pileup of events – each one canceling out the one before – is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the Trump presidency.”

At the White House meeting, Trump reportedly used the word “sh*#hole” as an adjective to describe Haiti and some nations in Africa.

The comment generated a wave of revulsion and followed a year of Trump’s debasing the presidency with appeals to racists, a disregard of presidential norms against self-dealing, attacks on judges and a worldview that appears to be informed solely by cable news.

The word “sh*#hole” does not appear in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. It’s profanity and slang, I suppose. Of course, racism does appear in the dictionary and, of the time of this writing, was the third most looked up word in the past 24 hours. (You can find “sh*#hole” in Urban Dictionary.)

In the wake of Trump’s comment, people the world over took to Facebook and Twitter to call him out by, among other things, noting their living in places such as “South Shi*#hole” or, to ask, as the writer Peter Godwin did, whether “Nambia is a shi*#hole.”

As the posts suggest, the Trump presidency demands vigilance against what Masha Gessen, writing in The New Yorker, calls “the ongoing degradation of the public sphere.”

The news, Gessen notes, is not that the president “is a foul-mouthed racist – we knew that… the news is that he insists on dragging the rest of us down with him.” (David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick of the Times have attempted to compile a definitive list of Trump’s racist comments, dating to his years in New York and continuing through his asserting that the nation’s first black president was not born in the U.S.).

We can choose not to be degraded – to show the self-respect that is beyond the president. As the spokeswoman for African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki, noted, “The United States of America is a big country and the United States of America goes beyond just one man or one statement.”

Categories
Politics

Donald Trump did not campaign to be president

Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House corroborates something that reporting on the president has alluded to previously: He never contemplated that he might be elected.

For Trump, a businessman turned reality TV star, the campaign represented an exercise in brand building. The Times’ election tracking needle wasn’t the only indicator that Hillary Clinton would win the election. Until the end, Trump thought she would too.

“The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit; we don’t have to be anything but who and what we are, because of course we won’t win,” Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

For Trump, “losing was winning,” Wolff adds. “Trump would be the most famous man in the world – a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.”

The calculus also applied to members of Trump’s campaign team.

In Wolff’s telling, the campaign would vault Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to the status of global celebrities and ambassadors for the Trump brand. Steve Bannon “would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.”

Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star. And Melania Trump could return “to inconspicuously lunching” and raising the couple’s son.

Anyone who has watched Trump before or after the election could reasonably wonder why he even wanted to be president.

“After little more than three weeks, Trump’s behavior is no more erratic than it used to be, but in the context of the Presidency it seems so,” Jeffrey Frank, writing in The New Yorker, noted last February, less than a month after Trump took the oath of office.

Frank ventured that nothing the presidency offered could top the reality that Trump had created for himself in New York. As Frank put it:

“Life in midtown Manhattan was good for a fellow like Trump, who was recognized everywhere and regarded even by his detractors more as a cartoon than a threat. He could enjoy the city’s pleasures, which included dining at San Pietro, a favorite restaurant… For someone like Trump, Washington cannot be the most exciting place to live, and won’t be unless he begins to thrive in the company of world leaders who don’t speak English, and philosophers like Paul D. Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who could probably go on for hours about, say, how a medical savings account offers tax relief for low-income workers who are about to lose their affordable health insurance. Then there are the briefings and hours of meetings and piles of memoranda, but having to read more than a page, or too many bullet points, is said to test the limits of Trump’s attention—and the camera demands the image of stern attention. That, at least, seems to be one of his core beliefs.

Wolff’s book does nothing so much as confirm that observation. Which leaves one to wonder whether instead of railing against Wolff, the president would not have been better off simply noting that Wolff gets most of the story right. And leave it that. At least that would jibe with reality.

The issue isn’t that Trump was a long shot. Underdogs win elections, too. Trump gamed the process to achieve an end other than the one he set out to achieve. By winning he failed miserably. That has to be a first in the history of the presidency.

Categories
Asides

What social media showed us in 2017

On May 26, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio to talk with the American people about mobilizing for war. The address was the 14th “fireside chat” by the president, who during the Depression began the practice of using the airwaves to address Americans directly.

In “No Ordinary Time,” her history of the Roosevelt administration on the home front in World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that during such talks the public could imagine that they were sitting beside the president in his study.

Kearns Goodwin quotes Richard Strout, a journalist who worked for The New Republic during those years. “You felt he was talking to you,” Strout recalled about FDR. “Not to 50 million others but to you personally.”

The idea of talking directly to Americans (and the world) found its footing anew in 2017 thanks to social media. Twitter alone reaches more than three times as many people each day as FDR reached via the radio.

Just over a year ago, Leslie Stahl of CBS News asked then President-elect Donald Trump whether he planned, after he became president, to keep up the use of Twitter that he had wielded during the campaign.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump replied. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication… It’s where it’s at… I really believe that, the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.”

As we now know, Trump has not held back. In 2017, he used Twitter to speak to supporters. But he also used it to endorse a hate group, antagonize allies, threaten nuclear war, bully civil servants, and sow discord at home and abroad.

Of course, social media works two ways. When Trump appeared to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House, LeBron James, who reaches nearly as many people on Twitter as the president, rebuked him.

As Christopher Clarey noted on Friday in the Times, social media also gives athletes the means to amplify their messages – an opportunity for activism that many athletes have seized this year. Clarey notes:

What is evident is that the internet’s capacity to make the distant seem personal is not going away. Whether they are asked political questions or not, athletes, like other celebrities, will continue to be able to deliver their messages — be they solipsistic or deeply civic — directly and immediately to the public, no gatekeepers required.

Experts may debate whether a president actually can launch a nuclear strike at the touch of a button. But this year has showed that a president can risk apocalypse at the touch of a smartphone.

If anything, 2017 underscored that we are less likely to experience the moment at a remove. The year also highlighted, as the reaction to the tweet by James – which was liked by seven times as many people as the tweet by Trump that provoked it – the collective intelligence that modern media make possible.

Abraham Lincoln died a dozen years before Thomas Edison invented the first device that could record and playback sound. We infer what the 16th president sounded like by piecing together accounts of those who heard him speak.

Now, thanks to Twitter, we know what the president just watched on cable news.

“They can’t handcuff him,” Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for the Times, told CNN recently. “They can’t break his fingers to keep him from tweeting. They do tell him: ‘Please don’t do this.’ He does these things anyways.”

Of course, the technology does not release the messenger from responsibility for his message.

As it happens, one of the protests that resonated the loudest this year was also the quietest.

It began a year earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the national anthem, a day after tweeting a message that compared the American and Confederate flags.

At least one reporter captured the portent of the moment. “At a time when NFL players are criticized for not speaking out on social issues, Kaepernick has provided a very significant and conspicuous gesture,” wrote Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk. “As the team noted, it’s his right to do so. But given that Kaepernick opted to make a stand by sitting during the traditional pregame honoring of the country and its flag — which is so tightly woven into the DNA of the NFL — there surely will be a reaction.”

Categories
World

The cost of recognizing Jerusalem

On Wednesday evening, hours after declaring that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, President Trump greeted friends and family who gathered at the White House to mark the start of Hanukkah.

“Well, I know for a fact there are a lot of happy people in this room,” he said to applause. “Jerusalem.” The declaration may have played well in the room, but it flopped everywhere else:

Thousands of Palestinian protestors took to the streets in the West Bank and Gaza; at least two protestors were killed and 98 wounded. (Haaretz)

Israeli forces fired at protestors along the border with Gaza, wounding at least 31 people (Reuters); Israel alleged that rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel. (Washington Post)

Protests took place across Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia and Iran, as well as in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. (BBC)

Fourteen members of the U.N. Security Council have criticized the move. (AP)

The move embarrasses both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of the U.S.’s main allies in the Sunni Muslim world. (FT)

The U.N.’s envoy to the Middle East said that the comments by Trump undermined a decades-old consensus. (Guardian)

The status of Jerusalem is among the top sticking points in the peace process.

For Trump the declaration represented payback to a political base that includes pro-Israel Republicans and evangelical Christians. “While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver,” he said. Today, I am delivering.”

To bolster the point, the White House released testimonials from Republicans (and one Democrat).

No nation has an embassy in Jerusalem. The declaration by Trump affirms America’s status as an outlier in a world that is moving on without the U.S. and that presidents of both parties once worked to inspire.

Categories
News

Trump cedes US leadership on trade

The leaders of the world’s two largest economies each presented their views in a pair of speeches on Friday that highlight the extent to which the U.S. in the Trump presidency is ceding leadership in trade.

President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s second-largest economy, discussed climate change, globalization, multilateralism and connectivity in an address on Friday to leaders of 21 countries who gathered in Vietnam for the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Council.

He spoke minutes after President Trump, who talked mostly about America and the indignities he contends it has suffered at the hands of trading partners.

Xi spoke of connection. “This is a new journey toward greater integration with the world and an open economy of higher standards,” he said. “We should uphold multilateralism, pursue shared growth through consultation and collaboration, forge closer partnerships, and build a community with a shared future for mankind.”

Trump listed grievances. He accused China of stealing intellectual property, muscling out private enterprise, hacking into the computer systems of U.S. companies, competing unfairly and failing to open markets for goods and services. “We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore,” Trump told the gathering.

Xi used the words “shared” and “community” eight times apiece. He used the word “open” 18 times, three times more than Trump, who used the word “community” once. Twice Xi mentioned “climate change,” which Trump never uttered.

The stance marked a turnabout from a day earlier in Beijing, where Trump flattered Xi and blamed his American predecessors for the imbalance in trade between the two countries.

Trump tends to talk tough when surrounded by the press. Alone with his fellow leaders, it seems, is another story. After meeting on the sidelines of the summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump told reporters that he believed assurances by Putin that Russia “did not meddle in our election.”

Though Trump later appeared to walk back the suggestion that he placed more stock in the assurances of the former head of the KGB than he does in a determination by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election, the exchanges with both Putin and Xi suggest struggles by the self-proclaimed dealmaker to hold his own with counterparts.

Xi talked of China’s Belt and Road initiative, as part of which the country has pledged to spend more $1 trillion to build infrastructure across Asia, Africa and Europe over the next decade. As Anja Manuel, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, noted recently in the Atlantic:

According to the CIA, 92 countries counted China as their largest exports or imports partner in 2015, far more than the United States at 57. What’s most astounding is the speed with which China achieved this. While the country was the world’s largest recipient of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans in the 1980s and 90s, in recent years, China alone loaned more to developing countries than did the World Bank.

One result: There are now more than 10,000 Chinese firms (most privately owned) operating in Africa, up from 2,500 a decade ago, according to research by McKinsey & Co. Visit South Africa, to name one destination for Chinese investment, and you’ll see the evidence at construction sites and shops all around you.

At APEC, 11 nations, including Australia, Japan, Mexico and Canada, said they had achieved significant progress toward a revised trans-Pacific trade pact, which Trump withdrew from in March. America “has lost its leadership role,” Jayant Menon, an economist at the Asian Development Bank, told the Times. “And China is quickly replacing it.”

Which leaves the question how the smallness of the vision expressed by Trump helps the people who voted for him, particularly those in areas of the Midwest and Northeast that have experienced the trauma of the loss of jobs in manufacturing.

The U.S. imports more goods from China than it exports. The difference stood at $347 billion in 2016, a decrease of 5.5% from a year earlier. But the U.S. exports more services to China than it imports. The difference was $37 billion in 2016, up 12.3% from year earlier.

The surplus in services represents demand in China for such American exports as logistics, software, financial know-how and tickets to movies made in Hollywood. It reflects visits to the U.S. by people from China, and students who come to the U.S. from China to study.

“If our trade deficit for goods is somehow related to unfair trade practices, then how does Trump explain America’s large and growing surpluses for services,” Mark Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told the South China Morning Post in May.

Trump doesn’t say much about that surplus. Nor does he put forth or embrace efforts to bring college-educated graduates to Rust Belt cities that might benefit from an influx of productivity and capital.

Writing recently in the Harvard Political Review, Henry Sullivan Atkins cited the payoff in Pittsburgh of efforts to transform an economy that once relied on heavy manufacturing.

According to Atkins, “Pittsburgh offers a textbook example of successfully attracting these college-educated adults:  The number of city residents aged twenty-five and older with a college degree skyrocketed by 37.3 percent from 2000 to 2013.

Over roughly the same period, productivity among workers in the Pittsburgh region rose 10 percent, average annual wages increased 9 percent and the overall standard of living rose 13 percent.

“This demographic sea change didn’t occur in a vacuum; rather, it was the result of a series of careful policymaking decisions that came from the city,” Atkins writes. “Firstly, the city invested in providing a top-notch education for its residents, collaborating with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh to transform Pittsburgh from the Steel City of the 1980s into a STEM juggernaut in fields like computing, robotics and biotechnology.”

In September, Trump directed the Department of Education to invest $200 million toward the teaching of science, technology, engineering and math in public schools. Tech giants, including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, added $300 million to the push.

“Where that money will be pulled from remains to be seen, but with around just 40 percent of schools currently teaching computer programming, it would be good if this push had some success,” noted Mallory Locklear for Engadget.

Credit Trump for jump-starting a partnership with potential for payoff in the form of college graduates, skills and jobs. Leadership takes a thousand such acts (and the investments that accompany them), but the approach hints at a way forward for the U.S. that has nothing to do with withdrawing from a world that has moved on.

Categories
News Politics

Plea shows Trump campaign knew of Russia ties

Among the evidence cited by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III against George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to President Trump’s campaign who has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators, is a series of exchanges between Papadopoulos and campaign officials.

Papadopoulos admitted to lying to investigators about his relationship with a professor who claimed to connections with the Russian government and senior officials there who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

If nothing else, the correspondence establishes, as the Washington Post wrote on Monday, “that while senior Trump officials at times rebuffed or ignored Papadopoulos, they were well aware of his efforts, which went on for months.”

On April 27, 2016, Papadopoulos wrote to a high-ranking campaign official to discuss Russia’s interest in hosting then-candidate Trump. “Have been receiving a lot of calls over the last month about Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right,” Papadopoulos said in an email to the unnamed official, according to a court filing.

Papadopoulos reiterated the message to the official in a message dated May 14, as well as to “another high-ranking campaign official” in a missive dated May 21.

Though Trump and the Russian president did not, as far as we know, meet during the campaign, on August 15, an unnamed campaign supervisor urged Papadopoulos to meet with the Russians off-the-record. “I would encourage you,” the official told Papadopoulos.

“Make the trip, if it is feasible,” Sam Clovis, another foreign policy advisor  who currently serves as a White House liaison to the Department of Agriculture, reportedly replied.

Papadopoulos also reportedly wrote to Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was indicted on Monday for tax fraud and money laundering in connection with sums he received for representing the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.

The White House on Monday tried to minimize Papadopoulos and his role, which Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters was “extremely limited; it was a volunteer position.”

Still, Trump touted Papadopoulos as a member of the campaign’s foreign policy team in a meeting in March 2016 with the Washington Post’s editorial board. (“He’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy,” the candidate said.)

The guilty plea provides investigators with a road map for their inquiry into whether Team Trump cooperated with the Russians to influence the outcome of the campaign. Whether Papadopoulos received a paycheck may be besides the point.