In a remarkably patronizing and tone-deaf moment - even for him - President Trump has decided that the torrent of protest against sexual assault is "very, very good for women. And I'm very happy a lot of these things are coming out.
Editor’s Note: The news is coming so fast and furious, from so many sources and in so many fragments, that it takes more than a scorecard to keep up with the Trump-Russia Connection. It takes a timeline — a “map,” if you will, of where events and names and dates and deeds converge into a story that makes sense of the incredible scandal of the 2016 election and now of the Trump Administration.
For years Steve Harper produced timelines for the cases he argued or defended in court as a successful litigator. Retired now from practicing law, Harper has turned his experience, talent, and curiosity to monitoring for BillMoyers.com the bizarre and entangled ties between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and the murky world of Russian oligarchs, state officials, hackers, spies, and Republican operatives. You can check out the over 700 entries right here. But for an overview — and some specifics — of recent developments, I called up Steve to give us a sense of the emerging story.
—Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers: You’re the consummate trial lawyer with a celebrated reputation for summing up the closing argument for the jury, but from our work together on the timeline I know you also have the instincts of a journalist. So write the lede to the story this far: What’s the most important thing for us to know about the Trump/Russia connection as of today?
Steven Harper: Everything the Trump campaign told you about the connections between Trump and Russia was a lie.
Moyers: Go on.
Harper: Well, there are a number of different dimensions to the issue, but let’s just take the easiest one. The other day The Washington Post published a very good article that said for all of Trump’s denials during the campaign of any connections between him, his campaign and Russia, it turns out there were 31 interactions. And there were 19 meetings. Furthermore, what Trump and his people have been doing since then is everything they can to keep the public from being aware of the truth. And this feeds into the obstruction story.
Moyers: How so?
Harper: Up to and including the firing of James Comey, Trump did everything he could to try to shut down, slow down or stop the investigation. First, he tried to shut down the investigation of Mike Flynn. Then it turned out that Mike Flynn is probably just a piece of a much larger problem, which is Russia. Trump admitted to the Russian ambassador and to the Russian foreign minister shortly after he fired Comey that now he’s got some relief from the Russia problem — in other words, Comey’s gone! But what’s happened since then is the continuing effort to interfere with the investigation, even in the form of tweets — all of which sure look a lot to me like witness intimidation for some of the key players in the saga.
And then there’s a third component, which is in a way the most insidious — the willingness of the congressional GOP to be complicit in all of this. We’re talking now about a prescription for disaster for democracy. It’s all part of the same story. If you think about it, every single person who has said something about there being no connection between Trump and Russia during the campaign has been caught in a lie about it. Even with this fellow George Papadopoulos, the talking point immediately became, “Well, he didn’t get in trouble for anything that he did, he got in trouble for lying to federal investigators.” Sure, and what was he lying to federal investigators about? About whether or not there were any contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. And that’s the part that everybody glosses over in terms of the talking points on the Republican side.
Moyers: George Papadopoulos was the youngest of Trump’s foreign policy team and not a prominent public figure. Now Trump loyalists say he wasn’t taken all that seriously by the campaign.
Harper: That’s another remarkable thing, of course — all the policy advisers all of a sudden are relegated to the status of low-level, unpaid volunteers, even though they sat in a meeting of foreign policy advisers with the presidential candidate himself early on. When they turn out to be suspects in this investigation, they all drop to the bottom of the heap, and it’s as if Trump had never heard of any of them.
Moyers: It’s usual in a case like this to move the paramount figures to the expendable list, no?
Harper: Oh sure, absolutely, and I fully expect before this is over, you’re going to get to a point where Donald Trump will say, “Oh, yeah, Donald Jr. — you know he was only my son for a very limited period of time.” It’s absurd. And it started with Paul Manafort — the same Manafort who actually delivered decisive delegates to Trump during a crucial period of the campaign. When the heat was turned on Manafort, they all said: “Oh, well, he played a limited role for a limited period of time.” Yeah, he was only manager of the campaign, how about that?
Moyers: Perhaps Trump, who aspired to be a great American president, will confess: “And I was just a real estate guy.” [laughter] Robert Mueller is moving quickly with the investigation now. We have new news almost every day. What’s the most recent development that strikes you as most important?
Harper: Three different strands have now begun to coalesce. There’s a core strand running through it that I call the “follow the money” strand. Perhaps most of what happened throughout the campaign, if you view it from Vladimir Putin’s side of the transaction, looks quite reasonable and makes a great deal of sense. Putin wants to eliminate sanctions on Russia, both because they affect him personally in a financial way and because they affect his country’s economy in a big way. So you dangle in front of Trump the prospect of a Trump Tower in Moscow. We always knew that Trump wanted a Trump Tower in Moscow, because Trump told us he did. But what we didn’t know was that during the campaign, the Trump organization was actively negotiating for such a development.
But two other strands have come together, and we need to understand them for all this to become a cogent narrative. The second strand involves political operatives. It turns out we’re hearing about people like George Papadopoulos, who obviously was in communication with the Russians, and that strand is now probably taking Mueller — certainly taking me — further up the food chain. Papadopoulos implicated Sam Clovis, the former co-chairman of the campaign. And with people like Stephen Miller and Hope Hicks, you’re getting right to the inner circle of the Trump campaign. All of a sudden last year, these low-level underlings, as they are now being described to us, were getting remarkable access, and they’re getting responses from within the campaign. They’re not sending emails off into cyberspace that no one ever answers; they’re hearing back from some of these higher-ups.
And the third strand is what I would call the “digital strand.” Cambridge Analytica, the Kushners, WikiLeaks — they’ve started coming together in a very dramatic fashion over the past two or three weeks. Pundits say they keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well, didn’t John McCain say, “This is a centipede. I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop.” It seems as though there is just no limit to the number of shoes that keep dropping in this thing. Everyone thought the big bombshell was the June 9 meeting and the Don Jr. emails that had set up that meeting in Trump Tower relating to dirt the Russians were promising on Hillary Clinton. And then we just get this even more stunning series of interactions and communications and exchanges that show the people that Kushner hired to run the digital campaign going to WikiLeaks, and reveal Don Jr. having direct Twitter communications with WikiLeaks about Clinton documents. It’s just remarkable. If all of this had hit at the same time, it would have been blockbuster, but because of the dribbling out of it, no one focuses on the extent to which some of these three strands coalesce. And they sometimes coalesce around what I call very hot dates in the timeline.
Moyers: Let’s pause right there. There’s a beginning to a story like this. So I hope you’re reading a new book out this week by Luke Harding, once the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian of London. The title is Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and how the Russians Helped Donald Trump Win. Have you been following coverage of the book?
Harper: Yes. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read a couple of excerpts and summaries of certain portions of it.
Moyers: Harding, who’s a very experienced reporter, quotes the British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, who worked in Russia for years and compiled that notorious dossier on Trump that mysteriously appeared last year. He quotes Steele saying that “Russian intelligence has been secretly cultivating Trump for years.” As you and I discussed in August, Trump appears to have attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence as far back as 1987, on his first visit to Moscow — a visit arranged by the top level of the Soviet diplomatic service, with the assistance of the KGB.
Trump was of course looking for business in Russia. If you go to Trump’s own book, The Art of the Deal, he acknowledges “talking about building a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government.” And he quotes a letter he got from the Soviet ambassador to Washington saying the Soviet state agency for international tourism is inquiring about his interest in that partnership. Now, one has to ask: There were lots of ambitions real estate moguls looking for deals with Russia in the mid-’80s; why did they select Donald Trump?
Harper: And that’s the $64,000 question. It’s very interesting and Harding notes this as well, and it also was an early entry on our timeline — that in 1988, when Trump came back from the Soviet Union, he first made noises about wanting to run for president. Which brings us back to the second strand developing in this story, which is the personal contacts, the personal operatives, involved in a pretty straightforward if not classic Russian intelligence operation. Russian agents — the recruiters — look for soft spots in their target — in this case, the US — and those soft spots become points of penetration. The Russians must have been astonished at how they achieved penetration in Trump’s circle — astonished at the success that they were having across many different fronts simultaneously.
Moyers: I remember from my own experience in Washington in the ‘60s that the Russians were always trying to find “soft targets” — American citizens — who were drawn to that sort of relationship.
Harper: And what could be a softer target for a guy like Putin than a guy who measures the world and everyone’s self-worth in dollars?
Moyers: Much of what Harding reports in his book is circumstantial, but it adds up to what is fairly damning evidence. You’re the lawyer — how much can circumstantial evidence be introduced in an argument in a trial?
Harper: Plenty. There are lots of people sitting in jail who were convicted on circumstantial evidence. In fact, how often is it that there is actually what you would call eyewitness or direct evidence of criminal behavior, except in a situation where you can get one of the co-conspirators to turn state’s evidence and squeal on the others? People talk about circumstantial evidence as if there’s something terrible about it. Circumstantial evidence is the way most people go about proving their cases, whether they’re civil or criminal cases. And what separates circumstantial from direct evidence isn’t even all that clear. Would you say that the email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and the lawyer who was supposed to come to Trump Tower with dirt on Hillary Clinton were circumstantial evidence or direct evidence? It’s certainly direct evidence of Donald Trump Jr.’s intent when he says, “If you have what you say you have, in terms of dirt on Clinton, I love it.”
Some people keep saying there’s there’s no collusion. Trump’s favorite expression is “No collusion. No collusion. No collusion.” All right, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about something the law recognizes as conspiracy or “aiding and abetting.” Let’s talk about a conspiracy to obstruct justice. In that respect, Trump’s own tweets become evidence. So it’s not as clear as I think some of the talking-head pundits would like to make it, that no collusion means the end of the inquiry. That’s just wrong.
Moyers: Suppose the circumstantial or direct evidence prove to be true; does it have to be out-and-out treason for Trump and his team’s actions to be impeachable offenses?
Harper: No. In all likelihood, treason may be the toughest thing of all to prove, because treason, at least in a technical legal sense, requires that you’re actually at war. And a decent defense could be for Trump that there’s been no declaration of war, so whatever was going on you’re never going to get it past the threshold of treason. There are still plenty of legal bases for concluding that Trump has some serious problems. One would be the election laws, including the financing of elections. It’s pretty clear you can’t accept help from a foreign government in order to win an election, and it seems pretty clear, at least to me, that if they weren’t actually using the help — and that’s a big if; I think they were, based on some of the things that I’ve seen — there’s certainly ample evidence that they were willing to be participating in whatever help anybody would give them to help Trump win the election.
The second category — apart from election laws and related finance laws — would be aiding and abetting computer theft insofar as there were illegal hacks into the DNC computers, and WikiLeaks and/or the Trump campaign knew that that happened, knew the hacks were illegal and knew they were willing to do everything they could to take advantage of it in order to help Trump win the election. That’s another fertile ground for illegality.
And the third category would of course be what I think will ultimately turn out to be the easiest to prove: the obstruction issues, relating to some of the behavior that we already know that George Papadopoulos, for one, engaged in when he lied to investigators about the nature of the connections between Trump and Russia.
Moyers: On the money issue, The Atlantic magazine published a very strong piece last week by Bob Bauer, in which he argues that Donald Trump Jr.’s private Twitter correspondence with WikiLeaks provides evidence of criminal violations of federal campaign finance rules which prohibit foreign spending in American elections, as you pointed out. He reminds us that those rules disallow contributions, donations or “anything of value” provided by a foreign national to sway an election. Those rules also bar a campaign from offering substantial assistance to a foreign national engaged in spending on American races.
Here’s a direct quote from Bauer’s article: “Trump Jr.’s messages not only powerfully support the case that the Trump campaign violated these rules, but they also compound the campaign’s vulnerability to aiding and abetting liability under the general criminal laws for assisting a foreign national in violating a spending ban. … The facts and circumstances here are without precedent in the history of campaign finance enforcement, and it’s hard to imagine that any truly neutral analyst informed about the law would conclude otherwise.”
So he concludes that Trump and his campaign face a “whopping legal problem.”
Harper: I agree with him completely. And here we reach one of what I call “the hot dates” when all these strands coalesce. You have these September-October email exchanges between Don Jr. and WikiLeaks. But now listen to what else you have: On Oct. 12, [Trump’s friend and former adviser] Roger Stone tells NBC that he has a backchannel communication with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks’ private message to Don Jr. suggests that Trump publicize the Clinton documents from WikiLeaks. Fifteen minutes later Trump Sr. tweets about those WikiLeaks documents. That’s on one day. This is all on Oct. 12. And two days after that, Don Jr. tweets the very WikiLeaks link that WikiLeaks had already suggested that they publicize. That’s one point where these strands coalesce. My point is that Bauer’s case is even stronger than he may realize when you look at what you and I have called circumstantial evidence of what other things were happening, and how other layers of action were behaving at the same time.
Moyers: As you know, American intelligence has identified WikiLeaks as a conduit for information that Russian operatives stole from Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign, and now of course it seems there was a connection between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, as you’ve just outlined it. What do we know about why the Russian government would choose WikiLeaks to release information hacked from Hillary Clinton’s computers?
Harper: I think it was an outlet that would ensure publicity, maximum publicity. It’s a notorious organization. And I think if you want bad stuff to get out there and you want everybody to notice it, WikiLeaks would be the way to do it.
Moyers: Donald Trump Jr. reportedly has released all of his correspondence with WikiLeaks. Does this indicate his lawyers don’t think it is incriminating?
Harper: I think it is probably more likely the case that his lawyers assume that it’s going to come out eventually anyway. So the best way to do it is to sort of dribble these things out, hope for an intervening scandal, like Al Franken groping somebody or Roy Moore upsetting the Alabama election, and then let the mind of the body politic move on to something different. The good news is that Robert Mueller is not going to be distracted by the intervening events, and he’ll put all this together.
Moyers: But how significant is it that when Donald Trump Jr. had all of this information from WikiLeaks, it’s now being reported that he looked around the campaign to see if he could find someone who would act on WikiLeaks’ information, and it doesn’t seem that anyone responded? His appeals seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Harper: What makes you think no one responded? The fact that there’s no email trail doesn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a response. We know, for example, that what was happening throughout the campaign were interactions and conversations and discussions in which certainly one of the topics included granting Russia relief from sanctions. I don’t conclude that because an email response to Donald Jr. has yet to make its way into the public domain, nothing happened.
Moyers: So when Donald Trump on Oct. 10, tells the crowd at a campaign rally, “I love WikiLeaks,” and accuses the press of not picking up on what WikiLeaks was publishing, he knew WikiLeaks had dirt on Clinton, where it came from, and he wanted to get it out.
Harper: You would think so. And I’m most happy, frankly, that Mueller has such an extraordinary team of talented lawyers working with him, because the case from the prosecutor’s side is a dream in terms lending itself to a coherent, cogent narrative that strikes me as a really damning case.
Moyers: Is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks in any danger of facing US prosecution?
Harper: Not as long as he stays in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Let’s assume he will stay out of the country for a while. I suppose Trump could pardon him.
Moyers: Is there any way that Assange could be viewed as an agent of a foreign power at this point, or is he just a rogue player?
Harper: My opinion is that during the election, he was an agent acting for the benefit for Trump. He claims that he wasn’t dealing with Russian documents. I find that difficult to believe. And certainly, as you said, the US intelligence community is of the view that WikiLeaks was the vehicle through which Russia distributed and disseminated its hacked documents. And I think he’s clearly acting on behalf of interests that are Russian interests.
Moyers: What do you make of Assange and WikiLeaks urging Donald Trump Jr. to suggest to his father that if he loses the election, he should contest the election? What was that about?
Harper: Chaos. I think the goal was chaos. That’s what takes me back to believing that at some level Russia was behind what WikiLeaks was proposing. Because for Putin there are two ways for him to improve Russia’s standing. One is to figure out a way to bring his country up. One easy way would be to get some relief from the sanctions. But an equally powerful way to do it is to bring Western democracies, especially America, down. So what better way to foment chaos than a postelection trauma, if you will, in which Trump is contesting election results in various states and doing all of the things he certainly would have been capable of doing? And of course, WikiLeaks feeds right into Trump’s soft spot by suggesting, in that same email that you just mentioned, that this could be good for him too, particularly if what he really wants to do is launch a new media network. So it all fits.
Moyers: What do you make of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. did not report to the FBI that WikiLeaks was soliciting him last year? Does that put him legally at risk?
Harper: The mere failure to report doesn’t, but it certainly adds to the question about what Trump Jr.’s true motives and the motives of the Trump campaign were in pursuing the information WikiLeaks was offering. Now, let me give you something else to think about, and see if your reaction causes you some of the heartburn it causes me.
In June of last year — quite a month, no? — there was another “hot date.” Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser — assumed control of the digital campaign and hired the firm Cambridge Analytica. We talked about Cambridge Analytica a moment ago. Well, Cambridge Analytica’s vice president had been Steve Bannon. And about the same time that Kushner hired Cambridge Analytica, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica is reaching out to WikiLeaks with an offer to help disseminate hacked documents.
And then you get to July 22 and WikiLeaks is releasing hacked documents. In August, George Papadopoulos is continuing to push Russia on the campaign team, Roger Stone is continuing to talk about his communications with Assange and WikiLeaks (and it certainly looks as if Stone is predicting more WikiLeaks releases of documents) and the daughter of the part-owner of Cambridge Analytica, Rebekah Mercer — who is also a Trump donor — tells its CEO to reach out to WikiLeaks too. And then Donald Jr.’s email exchange with WikiLeaks comes in September. See what I mean? There’s a ramping up of the process that culminates in those email exchanges that Don Jr. had with WikiLeaks and that becomes, I think, an important narrative to understanding the story.
Moyers: I need some Tums. [laughter]
Harper: It’s good and bad, I guess — getting mired in all these details. The good news is we learn more facts. The bad news is we learn more facts — and it may not be possible for Americans to put it all together and conclude that anything significant happened, when actually there’s a grave threat to democracy.
Moyers: Let me pause right there. As Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, the Justice Department is directly overseeing Mueller’s investigation. It has absolute power over the inquiry. Meaning that Mueller is now investigating his overseers. Isn’t that certain to have some impact on the process?
Harper: I don’t think so. Let me tell you why. I think the only thing that will affect the process, and this is the thing frankly that I fear more than anything else, will be if Trump fires Mueller. We know Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. If he should resign, that would be a great victory for Trump, who could then appoint someone else as an acting attorney general who could then fire Mueller, and the ball bounces to Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein’s been on record a couple of times saying that he hasn’t seen any basis for firing Mueller. And at this point, I have competing views of Rosenstein in general, but I think on this issue, he realizes that his personal interest and his professional interest and even the country’s interest requires that if Trump were to issue an order to fire Mueller or even if he were to try to interfere with Mueller’s investigation in some way, allowing him to do so will be a very bad thing for Rosenstein personally. I don’t think he’ll do it.
Moyers: There’s a precedent for this, of course. Nixon went ahead and fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate.
Harper: Yes, but he had to go through [Attorney General] Richardson and [Deputy Attorney General] Ruckelshaus to do it. Trump would have to fire Rosenstein, then he’d have to fire an associate attorney general named Rachel Brand, who — based on everything everything I’ve read about her — would likely balk and not be inclined to follow an order unless she were satisfied that there was in fact good cause to do it.
Moyers: What might provoke Trump to risk everything — firestorm, constitutional crisis, even impeachment — to fire Mueller?
Harper: I think he’ll do it if he thinks that things are getting too close. I think he’s already been close to doing it in the past. And I think at some point, and I think it’s probably a question of when [not if], he will fire Mueller. I really fear that’s what’s going to happen. And of course the irony is that for the amount of time Mueller has spent on the job, he’s achieved remarkable results. He’s working very quickly, very efficiently. The median life of a special counsel is just under two years. The average is three years. The Iran-Contra investigation went for six and a half years. Whitewater went for more than eight years. The Valerie Plame NSA leak went for two years. We’re what? Just five months in?
Moyers: And Mueller’s already obtained two indictments and one guilty plea.
Harper: Precisely.
Moyers: The indictments are for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. But the indictments are not related to the Trump/Russia connection, are they?
Harper: I think the answer to that is it remains to be seen. That’s clearly the way the Trump people are going to continue to try to spin it. But step back for a minute and think about the fact that a campaign manager [Paul Manafort] for a presidential candidate [Donald Trump] has been indicted for money laundering, tax evasion and all sorts of other wrongdoing arising from his work for Ukraine, where Putin and Russia were fomenting trouble. And shortly after he became the manager of the campaign, as we’ve learned, he was also offering to provide special briefings to a Ukrainian oligarch with whom he’d had business dealings. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see at some point some of these things merge into one another.
Moyers: You mentioned earlier that a new series of Trump advisers are under scrutiny. Hope Hicks is one of them. She’s perhaps the closest staffer to Donald Trump. Not even 30 yet, keeps a low profile, been with him a long time, apparently spends more time with the president than anyone else on the White House team. We’ve learned Mueller wants to talk to her. What have you learned about her and what can she add to this?
Harper: She can add a lot, I suspect. And I suspect that Mueller thinks so too, because as you say, she’s as close to the inner circle as you can get. She was also present at two really key points in this story — and many others, I could add. One in connection with what ultimately led to the firing of James Comey in May of 2017 — she was around for that. And as you may recall, we now have learned that it turns out that Trump had dictated to Stephen Miller, another close aide, what was apparently a four-page rant, or screed, of his real reasons for wanting to fire James Comey. So it’s hard to imagine that Hope Hicks wasn’t somehow involved in, or at least aware of, what was going on that weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey, when Trump was pouring his rage into that letter.
She was also aboard Air Force One — and maybe the lesson is you just never want to be on Air Force One with Donald Trump — when they were coming back from Europe, and Trump, as we learned much later, had a hand, a very heavy hand, in drafting a very misleading statement about what had transpired at that June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr., Manafort, Kushner and some Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Hope Hicks reportedly was advocating on behalf of transparency, but it appears that she lost out. And that’s just what we know Ms. Hicks was involved in. Who knows what else she was involved in and participated in, but I suspect a lot.
I also think she’s got a bit of problem because Carter Page revealed that she had been copied on those messages about what he had learned in Russia, or what he was planning to learn in Russia, when she had denied adamantly there had been no Trump campaign contacts with Russia. So she’s got a bit of a consistency issue there, it would seem.
Moyers: You mentioned Carter Page. He and George Papadopoulos traveled the world, apparently representing themselves as able to speak for the Trump campaign, even though the Trump campaign later said they weren’t. You’ve tracked down many instances of Papadopoulos in particular speaking to foreign leaders on behalf of Trump. Why is that important?
Harper: Well, he’s given extraordinary access to some very high-level people. He was giving speeches in which he was representing himself as being able to speak on behalf of Trump at least with respect to certain policies. And you know, it’s hard for me to imagine that he gets that kind of access unless there’s some credibility to what he’s saying about what his actual role in the campaign is. And of course we all know from the infamous photo taken at the Trump International Hotel that Papadopoulos was one of a handful of people seated at the table with Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump as Sessions presided over a meeting about Trump’s foreign policy and Trump told the group that he didn’t “want to go to ‘World War III’ over Ukraine.”
And I believe that’s what started the process of making clear to everybody who was on Trump’s foreign policy team that easing relations with Russia by easing sanctions, would be something that Trump would be open to. And I think a lot of what happens afterward you can fit into this broader framework of the question: What is Putin’s angle in all this? Well, Putin’s angle in all this is if he can get the Russian sanctions lifted, he’s a winner. And if Trump will help him do that, great. And even if Trump can’t help him, even if Trump doesn’t win the election, it can’t hurt that he’s created some chaos in a Western democracy, which clearly is what he intended and what happened.
Moyers: You mentioned Jeff Sessions. In his testimony to Congress last week, Sessions said it’s hard for him to remember meeting with, and conversations about, the Russians because the Trump campaign was in constant chaos. The fact that the campaign was in chaos certainly seems accurate, but would his excuse play at all in a trial?
Harper: No. And remember what Steve Schmidt, who was involved in John McCain’s campaign, said? He said he hopes that Jeff Sessions never gets a puppy because he’s not going to remember to feed it, he’s not going to remember to get it watered, he’s not going to remember to let it out. That puppy’s just going to be in terrible trouble.
But what’s interesting about Sessions to me is this: What Sessions said in his recent statements was, I haven’t remembered that Papadopoulos raised the issue of Trump meeting with Putin or members of the campaign meeting with representatives of Putin until I read about it in the news reports. But now that I’ve read about it, now I remember, and listen — I pushed back really hard and I said that it would not be appropriate for anyone to be meeting with a representative of a foreign government. All of the sudden, it’s like the light has gone on in Jeff Sessions’ head. Now, you have a situation sometimes in trials where a witness in a previous setting had sworn that he couldn’t remember something. And then six months or a year later, all of a sudden they have this epiphany and the memories came flooding out. And there’s something counterintuitive about somebody who says they remember more now about a specific event than they did a year earlier when asked about that same specific event. That just doesn’t play well with most juries.
And bear in mind, too, something else about Sessions that’s worth remembering that I doubt would necessarily be obvious to non-lawyers. Going into those Senate hearings, going into each one of those hearings, Sessions had to know that he was going to be asked about all of this stuff. And he had to know that he needed to be as familiar as he could be with whatever he could learn so that what he gave was truthful, straightforward, candid and ultimately something that the public and Congress would believe. And yet despite that, at each subsequent appearance, somehow there’s something new and the attorney general of the United States shrugs his shoulders and says, “Oh, I guess I did know that.”
My problem is, I want Sessions to hang on. I don’t want him not to be attorney general yet, because the minute that Sessions resigns or Trump fires him, then you have the door open to an acting attorney general, and I don’t want to live to see Scott Pruitt [head of the Environmental Protection Agency] or [former New York mayor and Trump ally] Rudy Giuliani become acting attorney general, which is something that Trump could do without even Senate confirmation. It doesn’t even have to be those two guys, because we know Trump has a plethora of cronies who will do whatever he says, because Trump says that’s what he wants, and if Trump says he wants Mueller fired, that to me is the disaster scenario for the country.
Moyers: So, to sum up for now: What’s the most innocent explanation for everything we know? What if all of this was simply Trump’s inexperienced people trying to establish diplomatic rapport with the Russians and hoping to reset America’s connection with Moscow?
Harper: Well, the most innocent explanation would be a level of incompetence and ignorance and stupidity that I honestly don’t think anyone could credibly believe, because the most innocent explanation is that Russia was launching a very sophisticated, multipronged intelligence operation and succeeded, but they succeeded because of the blind ambition and greed of the Trump organization coupled with a lack of judgment and intelligence and a fundamental failure to take into regard anything that would remotely look like patriotism when it came to the defense of democracy, subjugating all of that to the need to win. That’s the most innocent explanation. And I just don’t think all of them are that stupid.
Moyers: So what’s the most damning explanation for everything we know?
Harper: The most damning explanation is that the Russians launched a sophisticated intelligence operation. They found willing partners up and down the line throughout the Trump organization. And up and down throughout the Trump organization, as the details of that intelligence operation became known, the participants lied about it, lied about its existence, lied about their personal involvement in it and now they are all facing serious criminal jeopardy as a result.
Moyers: One more: I assume most people believe Russia’s interference in the election last year is a bad thing, a serious offense, but is it possible that by treating Vladimir Putin and his cronies as an existential threat, we’re playing directly into Putin’s hands and making him appear a more significant figure in the world than he really is?
Harper: Well, he’s already achieved that, but the problem is, what’s the alternative? Back in January, John McCain and Lindsey Graham were on national television acknowledging the seriousness of the Russian interference. McCain called it the cyber equivalent of “an act of war.” And if you acknowledge and recognize the existential threat, do you sit back and let the let the next thing happen in 2018 that Vladimir Putin wants to do? Remember, we have elections coming up next year. The uniform view of US intelligence is unambiguous, and if you don’t view it as an existential threat then you’re willing, I think, to sacrifice democracy.
We keep hearing, “Yeah, but Trump was still legitimately elected, he won the election fair and square.” Now we’re realizing that that may not even be true. I don’t personally believe that to be true anymore. I rankle every time somebody says he won fair and square, because that’s become less obvious every day. So the last line of defense would be, “Well, even if he didn’t win fair and square, he’s our president, so we’ve got to sit back and let whatever Putin’s going to do to us continue to happen because we don’t want our response to raise his standing in the world.” Well, I would submit it raises Putin’s standing in the world even more to have an accomplice in the White House.
Moyers: Thank you, Steve Harper.
The dread of politically combative conversations during the holidays—or awkward ones at best—is as akin to Thanksgiving and Christmas as turkey and candy canes. For people passionate about social justice, the holidays can mean a choice between throwing things in frustration or stressing out in silence to avoid confrontations with family.
According to a 2015 Healthline survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said holidays are “somewhat” or “very” stressful, and the survey did not even specifically ask about family-related stress.
Finding connection and engaging face to face is important social change work. Yet all too often, the same folks willing to march down Fifth Avenue or hold a sign on Capitol Hill are not willing to confront a racist uncle or climate-denier cousin. Understandable, but there are constructive ways to navigate difficult conversations. So, before you gather around the table for your annual helping of chitlins, tamales, or pumpkin pie, here’s some advice from psychologists and social justice leaders.
Being nervous during the holiday season is common. So Amber Hewitt, licensed psychologist for adolescent and family issues and adjunct professor at American University, recommends taking time to recognize what you are feeling and why, which can help you adjust your approach and have more productive interactions.
“Be aware of any precipitating feelings or behaviors,” Hewitt said. “Do you notice your body temperature increase? Or, are you starting to raise your voice? Do you notice yourself feeling irritable or getting fidgety? These might be signs that it is time to change your communication strategy.” For example, if you are angry or anxious, you are more likely to have negative or self-defeating thoughts. These kinds of thoughts block us from being receptive to others.
And only thinking negatively about the holidays and gatherings with family can make things worse, warns Peter Coleman, Columbia University professor of psychology and education and Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution director. People are susceptible to interpret a future event or experience based on previous thoughts or emotions.
For example, we are more likely to see someone else’s behavior in a positive light if we are in a positive mood. So, if you are already anticipating your grandfather to make an incendiary comment while passing the mashed potatoes, you are likely to only see his faults and ignore anything positive.
“If we enter ready for battle with our talking points sharpened and our statistics drawn, then battle we will,” Coleman said.
No matter what happens, though, we need to be kinder to ourselves during these stressful encounters, adds Mariel Buque, doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at Columbia University. Recognize that you are brave for having these conversations in the first place.
“If you’re willing to have the courage to engage in these conversations outside of activist spaces, you’ve already taken a big step forward,” she said.
You booked your flight. You made sure your shampoo bottle is under 3.4 ounces and your check-in bag under 50 lbs. Maybe you booked a hotel room or talked to your family about not subjecting your partner to your old bedroom and its Hey Arnold! wallpaper.
Either way, you planned ahead. You should plan for the holiday conversations, too.
According to University of Oregon psychology professor Gordon Hall, people can be grouped into three categories—dissenters, passive supporters, and active supporters. Dissenters will disagree with you and are difficult to convince otherwise. There is little common ground between you and a dissenter, beyond hobbies or reminiscing about a shared past. Passive and active supporters have much more in common with you and are therefore more likely to engage in meaningful conversations.
Considering ahead of time which group each member of your family belongs to lets you plan for possible conversations—not only conversations that could go poorly, but also topics that can be discussed without stress.
Stacey Long Simmons, National LGBTQ Task Force director of advocacy and action, agrees that you should brush up on likely topics so you can respond thoughtfully and not be caught off guard. Think about what is in the news or what has been brought up before. For example, she said, does your family know what it means to be trans or gender-nonconforming? Will current cases in the Supreme Court, such as those related to religious freedom, be discussed? Think about the best and worst case scenarios for each conversation, then how you will react.
“What will you say in response to an uncomfortable comment?” Long Simmons said. “How will you answer probing questions? What is your ‘line in the sand’ in terms of what you’re willing to tolerate?”
Finally, have a plan to protect your own mental health. Plan to go on a walk to clear your head or have a friend lined up to call or text in case things get heated.
There is a difference between debate and dialogue, reminds Azadeh Aalai, assistant professor of Psychology at Queensborough Community College. Dialogue is a shared learning experience, meaning people are open to sharing points of view and listening to others. Debate is the opposite. “In a debate or argument we take on adversarial roles and are combative and defensive,” Aalai said. “It is all about being right and proving the other person wrong.”
In the moment, ask yourself what type of conversation you are having. In a debate, convincing someone to even consider thinking differently is practically impossible. If you find yourself in a debate, give everyone time and space to cool off if the topic is something worth discussing. Then, return to the conversation with a shared understanding that the topic is about learning, not arguing.
Americans’ political and social beliefs are closely tied to identity, so challenging someone’s stance can feel like a personal attack. We react to such threats emotionally and, in the heat of an argument, those emotions can make us say things we regret.
Rather than trying to suppress these feelings, though, we should talk about them.
Use “I” statements to tell others why you feel the way you do or how the conversation is affecting you, Hewitt suggests.
Coleman agrees. Laying out a series of facts is of little use in an emotional argument, especially with the recent skepticism about “fake news.” Instead, be an example for your family on how to discuss the emotional side of sensitive issues without attacking others. Explaining how you formed your beliefs invites others to do the same, he says, which helps you better understand where they are coming from.
Even admitting to others you are nervous can be helpful. This shows you care about the conversation and the topic is important to you. “They’re probably nervous, too,” Buque said. “Sometimes calling out the emotion can have a more powerful effect than the content itself.”
It’s unlikely that anyone’s political stance or position on global warming will change before dessert. A person’s beliefs are formed over years of experience. Give yourself some freedom to enjoy the holiday.
“Sometimes the answer may be to just take deep breaths and try to get through it,” Aalai said.
Stay positive and don’t give up. Our own opinions have changed throughout our lives, so trust that others’ can do the same. “Research has shown that when people believe that others can change, they tend to approach them more cooperatively, see more value in engaging with them and voicing their concerns,” Coleman said. “As Nelson Mandela once said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’”
Also, have that second piece of dessert, Hewitt said. You deserve it.
Wyatt Massey wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Wyatt is a human rights journalist, currently covering childhood malnutrition in Haiti. He has written for CNN, The Baltimore Sun, America Magazine, US Catholic Magazine, and the Haitian Times.
The raging controversy over Judge Roy Moore’s alleged sexual improprieties—and the resultant threat of expulsion should Alabama voters, nonetheless, send him to the Senate, brings to mind similar cases regarding the fitness of elected representatives to serve.
Instances of either the House or the Senate exercising such power are rare, but the power to do so is quite real, granted to Congress by Article 5 of the Constitution: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members . . . . Each House may . . . with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.”
Tennessee’s William Blount was thus expelled in 1797 for inciting Creek and Cherokee Indians to assist Britain in invading Spanish Florida. As Civil War engulfed the nation, the Senate expelled numerous members for supporting the nascent Confederacy, including James Buchanan’s former Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Though slave state Missouri remained loyal to the Union, its two United States Senators did not—and out they went.
In 1909, Illinois selected Republican William “The Blond Boss” Lorimer as its United States Senator. Back then, Senators were still elected by state legislators rather than by popular vote, and when one state assemblyman alleged that Lorimer had paid him $1,000 for his vote, the United States Senate launched a full investigation into the matter. It found "that corrupt methods and practices were employed in his election, and that the election, therefore, was invalid." By a vote of 55 to 22, the Senate expelled Lorimer.
In 1918, auto maker Henry Ford faced off against Theodore Roosevelt’s former Secretary of the Navy Truman H. Newberry for an open Michigan Senate seat. The Republican Newberry narrowly bested Democrat Ford but soon faced charges of violating campaign finance laws. Along with 134 campaign aides he was indicted for breeches of state and federal election law. Found guilty in March 1920, his conviction was narrowly overturned by the Supreme Court in May 1921. In January 1922 the Senate voted 46-41 against his expulsion, but when the 1922 midterms shifted the balance of power in the Senate and retired many of his regular Republican supporters, Newberry threw in the towel and resigned that November.
Lorimer and Newberry’s cases involved violations of election law. Mississippi’s virulent racist Theodore Bilbo faced problems based not on the legitimacy of his election but on his words and actions. First elected to the Senate in 1934, he won again in 1940 and 1946. In 1947, however, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Democrat Bilbo. The matter was tabled, however, as he returned home for medical treatment. He died there in August 1947.
Five House members have been expelled, the first three for disloyalty during the Civil War. In 1899 the House refused to seat Utah Democrat Brigham Henry Roberts for his practice of polygamy (the Senate in 1907 voted on refusing membership to Republican Reed Smoot because of his Mormon beliefs but, nonetheless, seated him by a 43-27 vote). In 1967, the House refused admission to Harlem Democrat Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
In February 1919 the Wilson Administration convicted Milwaukee Socialist Victor Berger of violation of the wartime Espionage Act. The House refused to seat him, but Wisconsin voters returned him to Congress in a December 1919 special election. Again, the House barred his membership, and the seat remained vacant until Republican William Stafford defeated him in the 1920 GOP landslide.
With the exception of Utah polygamy, none of the above cases involved sexual matters. That changed in 1983, when the House censured both Illinois Republican Daniel Crane and Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds for misbehavior regarding seventeen-year old House interns, in Crane’s case a female, in Studds’s a male. Illinois voters refused to re-elect Crane; Bay State voters re-elected Studds six more times. A similar scandal sunk Florida Republican Mark Foley’s career in 2006, his resignation arriving before any real move to censure or expel him.
In 1995, Oregon’s Republican Senator Bob Packwood faced numerous charges of sexual misconduct involving staff members and lobbyists. Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Mitch McConnell blasted Packwood’s “habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a Senator.” Expulsion loomed but never transpired thanks to Packwood’s October 1995 resignation.
The Abscam scandal triggered Pennsylvania Democrat Michael J. Myers’s 1980 expulsion. In 2002, the House expelled colorful Ohio Democrat James Traficant, following his conviction on ten counts of bribery, obstruction of justice, and racketeering.
What fate awaits Roy Moore remains unknown. But the precedents are more than numerous for even more pitfalls than he now faces.
David Pietrusza is the author of such presidential studies as 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents and 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR: Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal and Unlikely Destiny. His TR's Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, The Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy will be published by Lyons Press in 2018.
This article was originally published at History News Network
It’s frequently joked that the loudest opponents to LGBT rights turn out to be gay themselves. The assumption has gained steam as anti-gay preachers like Ted Haggard were outed by gay prostitutes. Raw Story Vice Chairman Michael Rogers gained fame in the early 2000s for outing Republican members of Congress and their staff if they voted against LGBT legislation or worked for members that did. The activism became the subject of the 2009 documentary Outrage.
According to the Daily Beast, however, 2017 has become a "banner year" when it comes to those alleging secret homosexuality in politics. Vice President Mike Pence has long been the target of memes and jokes, however, former Ohio state Rep. Wesley Goodman was the one forced to resign last week after being found having sex in his office with a man. Earlier this year, former Oklahoma state Sen. Ralph Shortey was caught prostituting 17-year-old boy, though he pleaded guilty only to child sex trafficking. Both men are married to women and both are outspoken critics of LGBT equality.
The Beast cited a 2012 study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that prompted news outlets like The New York Times to post headlines like: “Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay.” The study suggested that some of the most strident "straight people" who showed signs of homosexual desires were more likely to discriminate.
The same study was cited after the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, after it was found gunman Omar Mateen frequently went to LGBT clubs and was on the gay hookup app Grindr.
The chief author of the study, Netta Weinstein, explained in a press release that the worst offenders “may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves.” Thus, American politicians attempting to hide their desires can button up and prove they're straight by attacking LGBT equality and same-sex marriage.
The 2012 study is far from isolated research. Other research has gathered similar conclusions. The Beast cited a Science magazine report after Pulse with a “scattering of research” suggesting “some conflicted gay men might indeed be homophobic.” Such as a small 1996 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology that actually charged genital arousal in men and linked homophobia to homosexual arousal. Notable, however, is the word "some." Response may vary.
The Beast argues there is enough research at this point that can verify that there is some truth to the "armchair psychology," but the theory of secret homosexuality is far from a 100 percent predictor. A Pew Research Survey counted 20 percent of people who self identifies as "highly straight," which is 10 percent fewer than the 32 percent of Americans who still oppose same-sex marriage.
While Pence might fall under both self identifying as "highly straight" and rabidly opposed to same-sex marriage, it doesn't mean he's secretly gay, despite his curious marriage traditions.
Worse, making such generalizations can actually harm LGBT rights and the movement. Lesbian comedian Carmeron Esposito has been critical of Pence's homophobic undertones
“Making fun of ‘closet cases’ only reinforces homophobia” because it “underscores the idea that being gay is shameful and should be hidden," said queer writer Lindsay King-Miller. It provides an “excuse for straight people” to mock men like Goodman or Shortey but still feel as though “they’re allied with The Cause.”
While the famous Shakespeare quote "The lady doth protest too much" might apply to the rabidly anti-gay, it isn't always applicable to every homophobic legislator. As newly elected transgender state Delegate Danica Roem proved, there are better ways to achieve new strides in the LGBT equality movement.
It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress.
Having had the opportunity as a former congressional staffer to experience his speakership up close, it was clear to me that Gingrich had a ready opinion on every subject from aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. He was usually wrong. But through a combination of confident and aggressive assertion, citation of “facts” and “statistics” that, while specious and cherry-picked, the listener was not in any position to immediately refute, and the glibness that masquerades as eloquence, he dominated his colleagues and set the House of Representatives on its path to becoming the extremely unfunny joke it is today.
Consistent with his pose as a public intellectual, Gingrich schmoozed with Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock. Yet one of his first acts on assuming the speakership was to abolish the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency solely responsible to Congress and which gave an appraisal of new technologies independent of executive branch puffery.
He also slashed the budgets of the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), impairing Congress’ ability to receive disinterested evaluation of a vast range of subjects. Who needs CBO (now a favorite whipping boy of congressional Republicans) when you know that tax cuts increase revenue?
What began with Gingrich has culminated in the nightmare of the Trump presidency, where wildly incompetent pseudo-experts run riot through the government and endanger the well-being of the general public. America has become a laboratory to test whether its institutions can weather the present flood of Republican expertise.
Republicans: Assuring National Insecurity
The national security functions of government have long been a subject of mystification: the public and the press have a tendency to regard its practitioners as a kind of priesthood possessing an arcane and special knowledge. But long before Trump, the GOP treated it as a political reward for crackpot ideologues whose credentials were thin or nil.
Bill Kristol, whose only qualification for anything was being the offspring of Irving Kristol, somehow blossomed in the late 1990s as a Republican national security expert. His current claim to fame is being wrong about everything; that has not prevented him from making a comfortable living via the “wingnut welfare” provided by right-wing media.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, caused my jaw to drop in February 2003, when he informed the House Budget Committee on which I served that the invasion of Iraq would probably result in fewer US casualties than the near-negligible number the military suffered in the Balkan intervention, and also that the invasion would pay for itself through Iraq’s oil revenues.
While his testimony immediately aroused concern if not derision in the country, most Republican committee members seemed to eat it up as the wisdom of a latter-day Clausewitz. On leaving the Pentagon, Wolfowitz’s gold watch for confecting such prophecies was the presidency of the World Bank.
The Republican so-called experts’ pronouncements weren’t exactly unplanned. In early 2001, just before George W. Bush’s inauguration, the Heritage Foundation produced a policy document intended to help the incoming administration choose personnel. The authors stated the following:
. . . the Office of Presidential Personnel must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective.
A decade and a half later, Trump’s operatives must have been impressed by one of the document’s authors, George Nesterczuk; he was nominated to become director of the Office of Personnel Management, but later withdrew his nomination, complaining about “partisan attacks” (possibly a euphemism for “careful scrutiny”).
Trump has built on Bush’s national security legacy. His first deputy national security adviser was K.T. McFarland, While she held national security positions in previous administrations, what probably commended her to Trump’s handlers was her stint as a national security “expert” on Fox News, a sinecure and career booster for the right-wing nomenklatura. From that perch, she recommended that Vladimir Putin be granted the Nobel Peace Prize. Foreign policy writer Jim Lobe describes her expertise here.
It also must have helped that she ran for the Senate in New York in 2006. Although she was heavily defeated in the GOP primary, she claimed that the campaign of the incumbent Democrat, Hillary Clinton, was spying on her through her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons. When called out on it, after denying she was serious, she later told a New York Post gossip columnist that news of her “helicopters” remark had unhinged her: “I sat in a ratty old robe, tears spilling down my face. To ease my anguish, I killed off half a pint of ice cream. Next morning, I was in the fetal position. Still crying.” To GOP talent scouts these days, anyone who spreads conspiracy theories about Clinton is bound to appear highly qualified.
Another early pick for the Trump national security team was Sebastian Gorka named deputy assistant to the president for terrorism issues. Although this pompous little martinet insists on being called “Dr.,” his Hungarian Ph.D. sounds suspiciously like the product of a diploma mill. His reputation since then has been “widely disdained within his own field.”
His professional seriousness may be inferred by his proposal to keep Muslims out of Hungary by affixing pigs’ heads to the country’s border fences, and by showing up at Trump’s inaugural ball costumed and bemedalled like the Balkan despot in a Marx Brothers movie.
His garment and insignia pin were seen as a reference to Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian organization that is a legacy of Hungary’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, causing some Senate Democrats to publicly wonder why Gorka’s membership in the group (a charge Gorka has strongly denied) did not make him excludable from the country. It may also account for his never receiving a security clearance high enough to be appropriate to his sensitive White House position.
Gen. Kelly: New Broom or Partisan Hack?
McFarland and Gorka are now gone from the White House. Is this a sign that a new seriousness is prevailing at the White House? Although McFarland landed on her feet (Trump nominated her to be ambassador to Singapore), Gorka’s departure from government was widely attributed to the arrival of Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff (predictably, Fox News is now providing Gorka with wingnut welfare).
But as we have seen in the distasteful episode involving Kelly’s public feud with a Florida congresswoman over Trump’s perfunctory condolence call to the widow of a fallen soldier, the usual press and public tendency to genuflect to a high-ranking military officer could be misplaced in his case. At the same White House press briefing in which he insulted the congresswoman, his reputation was further tarnished by his refusal to call on reporters who didn’t have a connection to Gold Star military families, thus suggesting that military members are of a higher social caste, as in Wilhelmine Germany.
While his comments about the congresswomen might have been inflammatory (in three decades on the Hill, I never heard an administration staffer insult a member of Congress in a room full of reporters), they might have been attributable to a faulty memory. But when documentary evidence surfaced that his statements were false, he refused to retract them, proving that he was not misinformed, but doubling down on a lie.
Lying and bullying are not necessarily signs of professional incompetence, but what about Kelly’s own expertise? When he was commander of the US Southern Command, he publicly stated that the border area where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet is a training ground for Hezbollah, a wacky belief out of the right-wing paranoia factories. With the existence of very real national security threats and the need to prioritize them, do we really need government officials who fall for such stuff?
Given the ongoing horrific situation in Puerto Rico, it is surprising that the media have not dug further into the state of disaster preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security under Kelly. Could it be that his prioritization of Trump’s border wall caused him to neglect other responsibilities in his portfolio, such as overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency? If budgets are statements of priority, that would seem to be the case.
Weird Science
The most visible positions in the Trump administration that show the real-world implications of Republicans’ preference for inverted expertise are those requiring credentials in science, as the well-known controversies involving the Environmental Protection Agency and government climate policy already have shown.
My first brush with the GOP mindset about science came during my tenure on the Senate Budget Committee in the mid-2000s. When the issue of Agent Orange toxicity came up at the staff level, the committee analyst for health care issues authoritatively stated to me that the chemical’s adverse health effects were unproven, and that the controversy was the result of whiny Vietnam veterans trying to get on board the government benefits gravy train.
In the real world, exhaustive research has shown the chemical’s powerful carcinogenic effects and the potential triggering of birth defects; Dow Chemical, a producer of the product, had known about these side effects since the 1960s. The analyst in question went on to work his magic on health care policy at Bush’s Office of Management and Budget.
A decade later, Republican science policy has progressed to the point where, as a matter of routine, studies are quashed, scientists purged, and policies resembling a voodoo spell promulgated. To justify ridding its boards of scientists who ever received a grant from the EPA and replacing them with industry-friendly shills, administrator Scott Pruitt referenced the Book of Joshua for support.
Pruitt has named Michael Honeycutt to head the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. Honeycutt decries EPA’s current too-strict standards for exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin causing severe brain damage), and believes ozone pollution levels can be relaxed if people just stay indoors. Another alternative scientist brought on board is Robert Phalen, who has stated that “modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.”
No catalogue of science experts would be complete without Sam Clovis, until lately Trump’s nominee for chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture. He is not a scientist, and his only agricultural expertise comes from having lived in Iowa, albeit in non-agricultural vocations. He has recently withdrawn his nomination, evidently because his real qualifications for an administration job are now being examined by Robert Mueller’s team of investigators.
Trump’s A-Team
Trump’s secretary of education is Betsy DeVos, a billionaire heiress to the Amway fortune, sister of Blackwater murder-squad entrepreneur Erik Prince, and a major Republican contributor. Her only qualifications for education policy expertise, other than those listed in the previous sentence, are her ambition to replace sound science teaching with biblical studies, and her desire that the flow of public money into public education be diverted to for-profit corporations. Her driving pedagogical zeal may be inferred from her statement that historically black colleges are “pioneers” of “school choice” rather than a forced adaptation to Jim Crow policies.
Trump’s other stellar cabinet picks include failed presidential candidate Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development. His resume is rather thin on housing policy, but his theory, stated during the Republican primaries, that the Egyptian pyramids were grain storage structures rather than pharaonic tombs, may have clinched him the nomination for a job involving a cutting-edge knowledge of buildings.
Another distinguished public servant is Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who during the Republican presidential primary debates in 2011 could not remember the name of the federal government department he wanted to abolish and now leads. He also said how surprised he was after being nominated to head DOE when he stumbled onto the fact that it is the entity responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, an activity which consumes more than half the department’s budget.
This is surely testimony to Perry’s relentless intellectual curiosity, given that DOE’s Pantex Plant, the country’s primary nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility, is located in Texas, the state of which he was governor for 15 years.
This glaring lack of qualifications for the job in question, something that would horrify the human resources department of any private company wishing to stay in business, has spread outward and downward through the federal agencies. Despite Sam Clovis’s withdrawal from a position at the Agriculture Department, the hiring of similarly unqualified persons at that agency continues: “a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company” are among the department’s new agricultural experts.
The Root Causes of Incompetence
Why has the GOP, the party that championed public land-grant colleges under Lincoln, created the Food and Drug Administration under Theodore Roosevelt, and backed the National Defense Education Act under Eisenhower, become the major political force behind aggressive and self-confident ignorance? The root causes lay both in elite and popular sources.
At the commanding heights of capital, do plutocrats like the Koch brothers want an EPA that forcefully curbs the prerogative of extractive industries to externalize their costs upon society in the form of pollution? Hence the new finding of an EPA adviser that mercury is not really bad for you, despite the common knowledge since the 19th century that the substance, which caused Mad Hatter’s Disease, is a powerful neurotoxin.
Do Robert Mercer or Peter Thiel wish to dispel the confusion about whether tax cuts for the rich create jobs and magically create revenue, but don’t exacerbate income inequality? Is it impossible that Republican politicians and operatives, at least at the higher levels, are so unaware of decades of empirical evidence to the contrary that they do not suspect what the real facts are — or that for-profit charter schools are not a panacea for public education? But they are not about to level with their constituents.
That said, the GOP did not conjure the current national receptivity to alternative facts out of thin air. They are taking advantage of one of the periodic waves of anti-intellectualism that have swept the popular mind since the days of the Salem witch trials. The present wave began with the rise of politicized Christian fundamentalism in the 1970s. Some reckoned that the tide was ebbing with the election of Barack Obama, but that was clearly a false dawn.
It is all very well to wax indignant over Republican politicians who routinely lie about the most elementary facts and denounce scientific consensus as a hoax. But they are routinely re-elected by an American population whose attitudes on evolutionary biologyare closer to those in Turkey than in developed Western democracies, and who also believe in the paranormal, and in angels and the demonic.
The implications of mass ignorance were well known to the framers of the Constitution. In 1822, James Madison wrote, “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
One of Trump’s latest judicial nominees, Brett Talley, has caught the public spotlight for good reason. But the glare of his inexperience is obscuring an even more troubling story about what is at stake in Alabama’s Middle District, where there are currently two vacancies on the bench.
Talley is only 36 — and extraordinarily unqualified. He was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week for a lifetime position on the Alabama federal bench and will be voted on by the full Senate as early as this week. As The New York Timesreported, Talley has never tried a case, has practiced law for just three years and was unanimously deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association — a distinction given to only four nominees since 1989. Talley also provides plenty of media-distracting fodder: He’s a horror novel writer, once belonged to a ghost-hunting group and is a right-wing blogger who has disparaged “Hillary Rotten Clinton.” Talley also pledged his “financial, political and intellectual” support to the NRA after the Newtown shooting. Even so, he refused during questioning by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), to say he would recuse himself from cases involving guns.
The subplot to this story, however, began to unfold Monday when The New York Timesreported that Talley failed to disclose in his Senate questionnaire, or during his hearing, or when specifically discussing his contact with White House lawyers, that he happens to be married to Ann Donaldson, the chief of staff to White House counsel Donald McGahn. Talley told the senators in his testimony that he regularly advised judicial candidates in his current role as deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy. He should know better than most that he is expected to be transparent. This is not a small oversight.
The Times explains the conflict of interest here:
District judges often provide the first ruling when laws are called into question, decisions that can put them at odds with the White House and its lawyers. Last month, for example, judges in Hawaii and Maryland temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s travel ban.
But it’s not just that President Trump is trying to recreate the bench in his own image: white, male and conservative. Christopher Kang, a former deputy counsel to President Obama, who was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of President Obama’s judicial nominees for four years, explains in a piece on HuffPost why the Trump administration would not only nominate such an unqualified candidate but would also, presumably, advise him to downplay his ties to the White House counsel’s office.
Back in May, President Trump had announced a different, more qualified, candidate to fill this seat in Alabama’s Middle District. His name is Judge Terry Moorer, and he has served in Alabama’s Middle District for nearly 30 years — most recently, as US Magistrate Judge for 10 years. Before that, he was an assistant US attorney for 17 years. Prior to those appointments, he led a legal task force that fought organized crime and drug trafficking for six years. He is a retired colonel in the Alabama National Guard and the primary architect of the Alabama Code of Military Justice. He is also Trump’s only African-American judicial nominee.
So what happened? Kang writes that in September, President Trump announced this “little-noticed bait-and-switch,” and moved Judge Moorer’s nomination to the Southern District of Alabama in order to nominate the ill-equipped Talley for a seat that by all appearances should have gone to Moorer. “At first blush, it seemed like the more qualified, African-American nominee was simply shoved aside for a less qualified white man,” writes Kang. But there are two open seats on the district bench, and a woman, Emily Coody Marks, was nominated for the other seat. Marks has escaped media scrutiny, but the 44-year-old lawyer has spent her entire legal career at one Montgomery law firm, opposing claims of civil rights violations, employment discrimination and labor violations according to a well-sourced legal blog, The Vetting Room.
Moorer’s answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, writes Kang, reveal a more likely motivation. When Sen. Feinstein asked Moorer about the differences between the cases considered by the Middle and Southern Districts, he responded:
Montgomery is the capital city of Alabama; therefore, a few different types of cases may more likely be heard in the Middle District of Alabama, such as redistricting cases or public corruption cases involving statewide elected officials.
Kang adds that the Middle District is also where constitutional challenges to Alabama state laws are heard: “Just last month, a judge in the Middle District ruled that two Alabama laws that would have severely restricted abortion access are unconstitutional.” This is why the Trump administration may aim to put the least-experienced candidates in the positions that will hear “the most political and consequential cases,” writes Kang. “President Trump once again has prioritized an ideological rubber stamp over everything else, including his own initial pick.”
Vox totals 145 federal court vacancies, including 137 in the US Courts of Appeals and the District of Courts. With 47 nominees already named, the Trump administration is moving quickly. Talley is not the first questionable nominee, and he won’t be the last as BillMoyers.com reported last summer. Democrats won’t be able to filibuster unqualified nominees because Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) moved to limit the filibuster for lower-court judicial picks in retaliation for partisan gridlock during the Obama years.
The federal judiciary is also aging. According to an analysis by Ballotpedia, by the end of 2020 just over half of the district and appeals court seats will be filled by Trump, vacant or held by a judge who is ready to retire. Any balance in the make up of our judiciary is eroding quickly. Call it a political horror story, but Brett Talley is by no means its main character.
Though he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, the Electoral College carried Donald Trump across the line with razor thin victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Nationally, he relied very heavily on support from a base few would have associated with Trump at any other point in his life—Christian conservatives. For decades, this group has advocated the sort of stern public morality that Trump has, for decades, publicly despoiled. And yet, despite his many flagrant sins—indeed, despite his refusal to repent for them—Trump won the support of America’s most self-consciously pious voters. Over the twelve months since, political observers around the world have been asking one perplexed and frustrated question: Why?
This article is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.
In his new book, Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, Stephen Mansfield seeks to answer that question. By contextualizing the 2016 race, briefly recounting Trump’s religious biography, and exploring the mindset of the “Values Voters” who turned out en masse, Mansfield works to make their choice intelligible. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with him about the lessons learned.
Just over a year ago, 81 percent of white, evangelical Christian voters supported a presidential candidate who could be the perfect avatar for everything they claim to oppose. Why?
They did it mainly because they felt traumatized in the wake of the Obama years and terrified by the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency. You have to realize that, if you were a religious conservative in America, coming out of the Obama years you felt like the administration had bombarded your faith. There was a strident LGBT agenda, a strident pro-choice agenda, lawsuits against—for instance—the Green family of Hobby Lobby for not wanting to fund abortifacients in their employee insurance, and even small orders of nuns were sued.* In the culture of conservative evangelicalism, there was a feeling that there had been a war declared upon their tradition. And Clinton would be more of the same.
So there was a very strong sense of fear and shared anger that turned people toward Donald Trump. We should remember, though, that he did not have the majority of the evangelical vote in the primaries, but as it became clear that Clinton would be waiting in the general election, I think it became obvious to a lot of religious conservatives that there was only one candidate who was—call it what you will—crass enough, harsh enough, bombastic enough, or strong enough to defeat her, and so they put their hopes in him.
As I say in the book, I think they vastly overdid it. They let their fear and their anger drive them to a virtual religious re-branding of Donald Trump, and I think it will have serious blowback for religious conservatives in America. But that’s what they attempted, and that’s why I think there was such broad acceptance of Trump among religious conservatives.
Your presentation of the white evangelical case against Obama is generous. But as I read this familiar list of complaints—about contraception, same-sex marriage, Planned Parenthood—it still seems to me that they are claiming the “religious freedom” to strip away other people’s freedoms, and that they feel embittered when they can’t. Having presented their case, are you sympathetic to it?
Well, I’m a Christian and a right of center conservative—not extreme right, but right of center—so I do understand some of that case. I do think that the Obama administration was overly strident against certain forms of traditional religion. But I take a different view on some issues. To put it bluntly, I am free of the fear about the future that many of my fellow Christians seem to feel, and I take a more libertarian attitude toward the acceptance of views other than my own in a healthy democracy.
I think the average religious conservative in America is afraid because they feel their America slipping away, that they’ve lost their position—their “privilege” if you want to call it that—and certainly their liberties. They feel like there is a fight for an America that once was and no longer is. Because I am a historian, but also because I think differently about the issues, I don’t share that same sense of paradise lost. I think we are stepping into a new world and a new order, and that evangelicals are going to have to learn to live within it rather than always raging against it.
You seem amenable to the idea that a lot of white evangelicals were so angry about Obama and the last eight years that they were willing to support just about anyone to get the Democrats out of the White House. So, as the saying goes, they “held their noses” and voted Trump. But political scientists have investigated this claim, and found that “Evangelicals who voted for Trump felt the same level of warmth for him as did other Trump voters.” Have they been claiming a reluctance that they didn’t actually feel?
I think there is a capacity for American voters to convince themselves that they are voting for the best of candidates in the worst of worlds. Many of them, when they leave the polls, will say yes, this is someone that I am enthusiastic about. But the speed with which Trump has lost popularity among evangelicals since taking office makes me wonder if they weren’t simply convincing themselves that he was the best option at the time and that, somehow, their vote was a “righteous” vote.
He’s had about a 10-15 percent drop-off in support from the evangelical community since taking office. So while there may be a sort of exaggerated self-reporting around the time when an evangelical casts a vote, there is some indication that there was never really that depth of devotion. I don’t think their support was ever very deep, and it seems to be weakening quickly.
It is well established that party affiliation is a major influencer of voting decisions, and equally well established that about ¾ of white evangelicals have voted Republican in the last several presidential elections. So are we overthinking this? Were they always going to vote for Trump simply because they always vote for the Republican?
I think that you’re making a good point, which is that there is a degree of essentially unreserved support for the most conservative candidate in any given election. But Donald Trump went beyond what a normal conservative, Republican candidate can count on from the religious base. He not only polled a high percentage of practicing evangelicals, but also non-practicing evangelicals.
(Some scholars make the distinction between practicing and non-practicing, meaning those who identify as evangelicals but don’t go to church regularly, and who tend to have higher rates of addiction, divorce, arrest, etc.)
He activated—and I’m from the south so I get to say this—the “Bubba vote,” even the non-religious Bubba vote. So Trump went beyond what John McCain received, what Mitt Romney received, even what George W. Bush received. I think that is attributable, again, to a lot of the anger and fear that these voters were feeling. Between his economic empowerment message and his overt support for religious liberty, I think that played very well within both practicing and non-practicing evangelical cultures.
You touch on race at several points throughout the book, usually as part of a list of Trump sins that white evangelicals were willing to look past. But white evangelicals are a white constituency by definition, and Trump ran a campaign based largely on racial demagoguery. Are white evangelicals more supportive of Trump’s racism than they’re willing to admit?
Well I can’t say that they are supportive of his racism, but they are definitely tolerant of it. This is one of the issues that I raise in the book. He got 81 percent of the vote from white evangelicals, and now evangelicals of color are looking at their white co-religionists and saying, Well I guess it didn’t matter to you that he was making those racist statements. I guess it didn’t matter to you that he has these feelings about Mexicans, Muslims, African Americans, etc. So I don’t know that white evangelicals were supportive of his racism, but it certainly wasn’t a deal-breaker.
I’m a little bit sensitive about this because—and I don’t mind injecting my story into this—that was one of the main reasons why I couldn’t vote for Trump. I have African Americans in my family, I have black nieces and nephews, and I couldn’t look them in the eye having voted for a man who seems to hold them in such disregard. All of that to say that this is all very questionable. I would be careful not to accuse white evangelicals of supporting Trump’s racism, but it’s very clear that they tolerated it and they voted for him anyway and that has created a very serious fault line in the evangelical community between believers of color and those who are white.
On top of everything we already knew about Trump’s views on women, the Access Hollywood tape went public less than a month before the election. At that point, I thought that he was totally done because there was simply no way that evangelical Christians could possibly justify supporting a man who said the things that he said. But they did. So what are we to make of their attitudes concerning infidelity, divorce, harassment, sexual assault, and toward women in general?
That is, in my opinion, a low-water mark for American evangelicalism. People who had stood before television cameras and in their pulpits and absolutely decried sexual excess and misconduct, and who pushed a very strong sexual purity message, were then able to turn around and say publically that, you know, “boys will be boys.” These were revelations about Trump abusing women—grabbing them inappropriately, speaking of them as though they’re meat. That was an extremely disturbing moment when we watched, as you say, these evangelicals making excuses for him. And I am very critical on this point in my book.
Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He’s not hiding who he is and he has never hidden from us who he is. He’s never even claimed to be born again or to be a great spiritual leader. But those around him, those religious right leaders who made excuses for him at that moment, who tried to rebrand him as Lincoln, as Churchill, as Cyrus the Great, Nebuchadnezzer, or whatever else, have not only caused a lot of damage, but I think compromised their entire message.
More disturbing, perhaps, recently the Washington Post has run a couple of articles in which they’ve asked whether there is anything that Trump could do to cause these evangelical leaders to withdraw their support from him, and their answers make clear that their thinking is transactional. “We support him until the last breath because he gives us access that no other President has given us.” They are admitting to the transactional nature of their relationship with him, and I think that is a dramatic step down from the loftier pulpits that they should be maintaining.
You’ve dedicated the book to the Millennial generation, and you told National Public Radio that the young adults you’ve interviewed have been repelled by the “hypocrisy” of Trump supporters in the church. What hopes and expectations do you have for these young people in the years to come?
Well, I like that they are oriented toward social justice, I like that they question what has come before them—I think only good can come from that. I’m sorry that they feel distanced from their churches because, in many cases, their evangelical churches have been too political.
But I’m not sorry that they’re searching, I’m not sorry that they’re raising questions, and I think ultimately this will produce good [things]. I think its good that there are tough conversations happening at dinner tables all around this country, in which Millennials are questioning their Boomer and Xer parents, and saying what in the world were you thinking? I think it’s challenging easy thinking and generational laxity, and I think it will do a lot of good. I’m glad the Millennials are the fly in the ointment, and I think they are striking out in some important directions.
I live inside the Beltway but outside the District, in Alexandria, Virginia. As you know, we just had a gubernatorial election in Virginia, and 70 percent of young voters voted for the Democratic candidate—and against Gillespie, who was the GOP candidate. That is almost twice the number in the previous election. So the young, probably in reaction to Trump and to some of the machinations on the Right, went strongly for the Democrat. I think that is an indication of future trends. It will probably settle down, but I think that the social consciences of the young are raising some important questions. We need to listen to them and I think we will be a better country for it.
Amidst shocking allegations that Roy Moore pursued relationships with girls ranging in age from 14-18 years old when he was in his 30s, a new poll shows that 37% of evangelicals are “more likely” to vote for Moore, while another 34% say that these allegations make “no difference.” Some of his supporters have upped the ante by saying that even if the allegations are proven true, they won’t think Moore did anything wrong because they didn’t actually have sex and “he was single” at the time.
This article is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.
Moore is the Alabama Republican Senate candidate and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice, familiar to RD readers from the too-many-to-cite articles documenting his ties to white supremacists and Christian Reconstructionists.
Incredulous observers won’t be able to make sense of Moore’s supporters while seeing the allegations only in terms of inappropriate behavior, or even alleged statutory rape. They will miss the point that the problem is actually far more insidious; a feature, not a bug of this subculture.
The allegations are being read by Moore supporters through a lens shaped by the courtship-purity movement promoted by the Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements widely influential in Christian homeschooling circles. And about which I write in my book Building God’s Kingdom.
As Kathryn Brightbill tweeted: “It’s not a southern problem, it’s a fundamentalist problem. Girls who are 14 are seen as potential relationship material.”
(And she’s written in more depth about that here.)
Many who embrace Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull came to the conclusion that contemporary dating practices are harmful to young people and sought to replace them with a system of “courtship” that occurs under the direction of a girl’s father. Courtship is intended to be specifically focused on finding a marriage partner—almost a pre-betrothal, if you will. Courtship happens in the context of a homeschooling family and community where boys are raised to be adventurous and economically self-sufficient with skills that might prove useful in a societal collapse, while girls are raised to be “pure,” meek, dependent and submissive with the goal of becoming appropriate “help-meets” in their future husbands’ exercise of dominion. Independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency on the part of girls is seen as a (sinful) violation of feminine nature.
While most courtship seems to happen between young people of similar age, it’s easy to see how this particular set of gendered norms leads to significant age differences in marriageability. Men need to be self-sufficient, women should not be. In fact, once a girl can bear children she is old enough to be married and the longer she remains single the more likely she is to lose both her “purity” and her God-given femininity, and instead develop a sinful sense of herself as an independent person. The result is that 14-year-old girls are seen as appropriately “courted” by older men.
In fact, a series of scandals rocked the Christian homeschool world in recent years in which older men admitted to inappropriate contact in pursuing young (sometimes very young) girls. See the story of Doug Phillips and Vision Forum here and the stories of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Biblical Life Principles/Advanced Training Institute and Josh Duggar, here. Josh Duggar was accused of molesting young girls (including his sisters) when he himself was rather young but his targets were even younger. In each scandal a core group of supporters defended the accused.
In other words, older men perusing girls as young as 14 is a natural outcome of the gender values inextricably related to notions of male headship & female submission, promoted in this, the most extreme corner of conservative Protestantism that Moore inhabits. This is a corner of the conservative Christian subculture whose influence far exceeds its numbers and that’s why this scandal won’t lead evangelicals to abandon him as a candidate.
President Donald Trump declared his nearly two-week trip through Asia “tremendously successful,” but economic history should make us more skeptical.
During the trip, the president continued to promote his so-called “America first” trade policy. He is orienting the country distinctly toward protectionism and claiming that unilateralism in trade is good for America.
Here is the problem: President Trump’s approach to trade seems to be based on a false understanding of how the global economy works, one that also plagued American policymakers nearly a century ago. The administration has forgotten an important lesson of the Great Depression, and virtually all economists agree that this could have unfortunate consequences for the U.S. and the world.
Trump’s “America first” orientation assumes that the United States, as the world’s dominant actor, can behave freely and independently in trade.
Unfortunately for the administration, America’s top economic position does not shield it from the dire consequences that unilateral trade policy can provoke. The constraints on U.S. action result from the basic nature of the international economy and from America’s declining dominance of the world trade system.
It is a standard principle of economics that all individual actors exist within a system. Any action taken by one actor will likely result in a response from others. This means that wise governments, in considering which policies to adopt, must make difficult calculations about how their actions will interact with those of others.
“America first” fails to make these calculations. It disregards how America’s trading partners will respond to the new U.S. protectionism – which is also what American lawmakers ignored during the Great Depression.
Before the 1930s, America’s trade policy was generally set unilaterally by Congress – that is, without the international negotiations used today.
Lawmakers, already in a protectionist mood, responded to the pain of the Great Depression by passing the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised duties on hundreds of imports.
Fortunately, America and the world learned a lesson from this experience. With the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 and its successors, which granted the president authority to reach tariff reduction agreements with foreign governments, U.S. trade policy came to be global and strategic. This new approach was institutionalized at the international level with the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948 and its successor, the World Trade Organization, in 1995.Meant in part to ease the effects of the Depression by protecting American industry and agriculture from foreign competition, the act instead helped prolong the downturn. Many U.S. trading partners reacted by raising their own tariffs, which contributed significantly to shutting down world trade.
The basic principle of these agreements is reciprocity – that each country will agree to liberalize its trade to the extent that other countries liberalize theirs. The approach uses international negotiations to overcome protectionist political pressures and recognizes that trade is a global phenomenon that generates national interdependence.
The dangers of ignoring history are only beginning to manifest themselves, but they can be seen in several recent developments that bode ill for us all.
One of the Trump administration’s first actions was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This agreement, which was a major initiative of the Obama administration, would have created the largest economic bloc in the world by linking America’s economy with those of 11 other Pacific nations. It would also have created an American-led, liberal bulwark in Asia against any Chinese challenge to the regional economic order.
Withdrawing from the agreement denied American exporters enhanced access to foreign markets and was a gift to Chinese influence in Asia. But we are only now beginning to see the longer-term repercussions of President Trump’s decision.
During Trump’s trip, the other 11 signatories of the original trade deal, including Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico, agreed to move forward without the U.S. This is a problem for America because it means that these countries will grant preferential market access to one another, making it harder for American companies to compete in their markets.
American companies are already feeling the impact of what happens when they’re left out of a trade deal. A recent New York Times article, for example, highlights the plight of American lobster producers whose prices are being undercut by Canadian producers in the wake of a new Canada-European Union trade agreement.
If the United States is reluctant to participate in multilateral trade agreements, other countries have every incentive to do deals that exclude and even may hurt the U.S.
Trump’s ongoing efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement also pose potential dangers. The administration has a tendency to speak of renegotiation as if it can dictate the terms. But while Canada and Mexico may be more dependent on the U.S. than the U.S. is on them, an implosion of NAFTA would be devastating for many U.S. industries that rely on North American trade. Markets increasingly worry that NAFTA may not survive the negotiations.
In addition to withdrawing from and renegotiating trade agreements, the administration has ramped up unilateral efforts to sanction U.S. trading partners for receiving subsidies or for dumping their products on the American market.
Decisions to impose trade penalties risk blowback, as when sanctions on Bombardier drove the Canadian plane manufacturer into the arms of Airbus, Boeing’s top foreign rival. The threatened imposition of sanctions on imports of solar panels may have a similar effect, damaging American panel installers and encouraging foreign retaliation.
President Trump assumes the U.S. can act unilaterally without consequences.
Economic history shows this doesn’t work. The world’s economies are far more interdependent than they were during the Great Depression, so the impact of governments all following a “my country first” trade policy – as the president said he expected world leaders to do – could have disastrous consequences.
Today, the international trade system America helped create, one based on open markets and classically liberal principles, is under threat as never before. Yet President Trump’s “America first” approach is a total abdication of the traditional U.S. role as its defender. And in fact, the president is doing his best to undermine that system.
In the final analysis, the Trump administration is reverting to a policy that is dangerous for the U.S. economy and for the international system.
If the U.S. abdicates, China may be the only country that can take the reins. The question is, what would that mean for the current system of open and free markets?
By Charles Hankla, Associate Professor of Political Science, Georgia State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Looking back at the last tumultuous year, to me, one of the saddest aspects of the Trump candidacy and presidency is that both in part were built from one of the basest of human impulses: revenge.
We’re taught that ideally, the desire to run for office should reflect a commitment to public service. And we know that the reality is far too often otherwise, running to slake a thirst for power and money that overpowers the greater good.
Yet to seek elected office for revenge, to use it to get back at someone or inflict harm on them or anyone associated with them seems in some ways even worse; shabby, petty and immoral.
Examine the roots of the Trump campaign and you see two men eager to use position to take revenge, to get even for insults, imagined or sometimes real, and to lash out at perceived conspiracies against them:
Donald Trump himself… and Vladimir Putin.
Whether or not there was active, knowing collusion, the two nonetheless joined forces to tap into decades of American fears and resentments not totally dissimilar from their own.
In Trump’s case, you don’t have to go to Vienna to figure out that much of his egotism and vainglory — and those tweets, God help us — seem aimed at getting back for slights that can go back just hours and minutes or sometimes even years. To be specific, remember the story of the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when President Obama jokingly skewered Trump, who sat at his table in grim-faced, aggrieved silence.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker was in the Washington Hilton ballroom that night and wrote four years later:
“[O]ne can’t help but suspect that, on that night, Trump’s own sense of public humiliation became so overwhelming that he decided, perhaps at first unconsciously, that he would, somehow, get his own back — perhaps even pursue the presidency after all, no matter how nihilistically or absurdly, and redeem himself.”
After the election, from each man there was feigned magnanimity toward the other but it didn’t last long. Like an uncontrollable tic, Trump continues to obsess over Obama, blaming any and all problems on his predecessor. Nothing, as we know all too well by now, is ever Trump’s fault.
In Putin’s case, the resentment is more geopolitical in nature and was aimed not so much at President Obama as at Hillary Clinton, particularly her tenure as Obama’s secretary of state. Here’s what Michael Crowley and Julia Ioffe wrote in Politico during the summer of 2016, when not as much was known or had been revealed about the extent of Russian attempts to hijack the American electoral process:
Former US officials who worked on Russia policy with Clinton say that Putin was personally stung by Clinton’s December 2011 condemnation of Russia’s parliamentary elections, and had his anger communicated directly to President Barack Obama. They say Putin and his advisers are also keenly aware that, even as she executed Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, Clinton took a harder line toward Moscow than others in the administration. And they say Putin sees Clinton as a forceful proponent of “regime change” policies that the Russian leader considers a grave threat to his own survival.
Confirming this in her book, What Happened, Hillary Clinton writes:
Our relationship has been sour for a long time. Putin doesn’t respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I’m a double problem. After I criticized one of his policies, he told the press, “It’s better not to argue with women,” but went on to call me weak. “Maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman,” he joked. Hilarious.
Clinton’s call for “fair, free transparent elections” in Russia led Putin to accuse Clinton of “interference in our internal affairs.” In retrospect, both statements are soaked in irony, as Putin’s revenge has taken the form of elaborate hacks and ruses via social media designed to interfere with and subvert free elections in the United States. Not to mention the ever-increasing evidence of Trump campaign team contacts with Russian government officials and apparent “cut-outs” — third party go-betweens used to pass information or to determine the likelihood of recruitment.
Of course, by most reports, Putin takes his revenge more bluntly against enemies at home and throughout much of the former Soviet bloc; political opponents and journalists simply die or disappear. But when it comes to the internet, Russia’s techniques have been infinitely more subtle and ingenious. In many cases, the nation’s troll factories have been pitting sides against other sides with phony social media accounts that take every conceivable position on an issue.
The overall extent of these attacks is mind-blowing. The German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy reported, “While Russian Facebook ads reached up to 146 million Americans, nearly 30,000 Russian Twitter accounts produced 1.4 million tweets around Election Day.” And in early November, NBC News noted that more than 3,000 “global news outlets… inadvertently published articles containing embedded tweets by the confirmed Kremlin-linked troll accounts in over 11,000 news articles in the run-up to the 2016 election, separate exclusive reporting shows.”
Then there’s this: the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 dashboard, a web tool designed to monitor Russian disinformation, noted that as special counsel Robert Mueller’s initial indictments went down:
… Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter employed the four D’s of disinformation: dismiss, distract, dismay, and distort. Outside of a day of fear mongering surrounding the terror attacks in New York City, the key words of the week (Clinton, Mueller, uranium, dossier, Tony Podesta and Donna Brazile) were all efforts to shift focus to Democratic scandals, both real and imagined. More importantly, over the past three weeks, the coordinated effort of Kremlin accounts to discredit Mueller and craft a narrative of Democrat-Russia collusion has moved from fringe websites to more credible outlets. What was once a conspiracy theory is now a mainstream narrative — and that is how a Russian influence operation works.
And let’s add one more to the mix of those players who are motivated by revenge of one sort or another. Please welcome Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, the organization so beloved and touted by candidate Trump for its leaking of emails on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
As reported by the aforementioned Julia Ioffe, this time in The Atlantic, despite its claims to be a nonpartisan dispenser of leaked documents, WikiLeaks — “a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked” — was constantly shooting off messages to Donald Trump Jr., offering information and advice and making requests, including that Donald’s dad, by then the president–elect, suggest that Assange be named Australia’s ambassador to the United States. I’m not making this up.
Assange’s record of animus toward Hillary Clinton is well-known. He believed she wanted him indicted for WikiLeaks’ 2010 release of 250,000 diplomatic cables and wrote in February 2016, “She’s a war hawk with bad judgement who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people. She shouldn’t be let near a gun shop, let alone an army. And she certainly should not become president of the United States.”
As per Ioffe, on Oct. 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote Donald Jr.:
“Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story…” attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.“Already did that earlier today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”
From such bitter nonsense, revenge unleashed, electors are swayed and empires fall.
Revenge, as the saying goes, is a dish best served cold. Putin the ex-KGB colonel apparently is taking his time, coolly mastering an operation effectively waging a cold cyberwar not only against the United States but Western nations in general.
As for Trump (who refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong and who for whatever reasons will never criticize Putin) and right-wing media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart (which are further spreading the fake news ginned up by Russian bots), if they think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, they are — surprise! — deluded.
Revenge is an ugly urge and a foul underlying basis for politics and government. It fogs the mind, disrupts equilibrium, crushes rational thought and too powerfully motivates our worst instincts. Further, at a time when fundamentalists and nativists seek to rule the land, revenge is distinctly, you should excuse the word, unchristian. That it has so infected the body politic, bursting to the surface after years of festering along with its helpmates bigotry, spite and ignorance, is a sad commentary on the state of the nation.
Revenge, another saying goes (or resentment or holding a grudge) is a poison you drink, hoping the other person will die. But in our current political nightmare, the poison affects us all: It envenoms and corrupts those who imbibe and while doing so murders society and democracy.
This is an emergency. We must find an antidote and fast.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump described his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a criminal and said she should be tried and put in jail (of her guilt, he had no doubt). Commentators at the time noted the extreme nature of such rhetoric and the fact that demands for the investigation and imprisonment of political opponents was alien to the American system. But, they speculated, perhaps it was just that—rhetoric—and with his inauguration as President, he would leave such dangerous talk behind.
It turns out, however, that Trump has proven unable to let go of his obsession with his defeated rival. In early November 2017—nearly one year after his election victory—he was not only continuing to attack Clinton, but also calling on the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate her. He he was “very frustrated” by the fact that he’s unable to order those agencies to “go after” his former opponent—something he said he would very much love to do.
It was a horrifying moment as the President of the United States, perhaps more clearly than at any previous time, expressed the thoughts and desires of an autocrat. And today, with the announcement that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will explore the possibility of creating a new special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton, those thoughts and desires have moved that much closer to being realized.
Such open calls for criminal investigations of political opponents are truly unprecedented in American history—and for good reason, since they would undermine the very foundation of liberal democracy. If the president could order the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton, where would it stop? Anyone who spoke out to criticize such a brazen act would be vulnerable to the same treatment. And then any individual or any group—regardless of whether they had actually done anything—would be at the mercy of Trump’s politicized justice system. The president would be able to exclude anyone he wished from the national community. The road to dictatorship would be wide open to him. We know this because it was such a system that helped destroy democracy in Germany and helped Hitler establish his Nazi dictatorship.
One of most significant challenges the new Weimar Republic faced was a politicized judicial system—an important element in the weakening of German democracy. One of the key failings of the revolution that toppled the German Empire in 1918 was the failure of the revolutionaries to establish a truly republican judiciary by allowing the judges from the old imperial system to remain on the bench. These were men who’d been trained and established their careers under the old authoritarian system. They had no sympathy for the new liberal, democratic regime. And the verdicts they rendered made this exceedingly clear. Political crimes committed by individuals on the left consistently received longer prison sentences than those committed by people on the right.
The best-known example of this skewed system of justice is the case of Adolf Hitler. Arrested in 1923 after having attempted to overthrow the government, he was tried and convicted of treason. The conservative judge sympathized with the young Nazi leader’s goal, if not with his methods, and therefore sentenced him to a mere five years in a rather comfortable prison. He would end up serving only nine months. A justice system that openly flouted the republic’s liberal, democratic values seriously undermined the government’s legitimacy and gave hope to those who continued to work for its destruction. In less than a decade, the battered republic would succumb, thanks in no small measure to the aid and comfort provided to the forces of the right by a politicized illiberal, anti-democratic system of justice. Under Hitler, the justice system became a tool for the establishment of his dictatorship and for the policies of exclusion he pursued.
Immediately after coming to power, Adolf Hitler targeted his main political opponents: the German Communist Party. With his fellow Nazi Hermann Goering heading the Interior Ministry, members of the SA were now deputized as auxiliary police and, along with the traditional police forces, tasked with the assault on Germany’s communists. Storm Troopers attacked communists in the streets, arrested them, and brought them to makeshift jails where they beat, tortured, and sometimes killed them. After the communists, it was the Socialists’ turn to experience Hitler’s brand of justice. Those not beaten or tortured to death were driven underground, into exile, or were sent to the new concentration camps being built and operated by the SS.
To the new Chancellor, the communists and socialists were not simply political opponents. They were enemies, traitors who had already betrayed the nation in the First World War and toppled the old regime in revolution. As a result, those who participated in this bloody state-sponsored rampage would face no legal consequences. Not only that, but “enemies” accused of crimes could face punishments far more severe than the law would normally allow. The man accused of setting the Reichstag building ablaze as the first step in a communist uprising, for example, should have faced a straightforward prison sentence. But Hitler’s desire for what he considered justice led him to pressure the Justice Minister Franz Gürtner (also a judicial holdover from the Empire) to write a new law—an ex post facto law that made the alleged arsonist’s crime a capital offense.
Hitler had begun to subvert the law to serve his political goals. Police and judicial authority had to be subordinated to the will of the leader. A politicized justice system would allow him to target and eliminate any and all groups he considered outside the bounds of the German national community.
One of the most important steps for any would-be autocrat is to gain control of the justice system and turn it into a tool for the elimination of any and all opposition. Normally that’s something that Americans observe from a distance—in the pages of history books or newspapers telling of coups and show trials and the exiling or execution of political challengers in some distant country or from some other period. Perhaps such distance has lulled Americans into a false sense of security. That’s something that only happens “over there,” or “back in those times.” The American tradition of liberalism and democracy will protect us. We’re exceptional.
But it’s precisely that self-confidence—more like self-delusion—that can work to Donald Trump’s advantage. His clearly anti-democratic statements and wishes can be shrugged off as mere rhetoric. How many people early on dismissed Hitler as a buffoon? How many people doubted he’d last any longer in office than his two most recent predecessors? Far more quickly than anyone would have imagined possible—helped greatly by the unforeseen Reichstag fire—Hitler had succeeded in bending the courts and the police to his will. By that point it was too late. German democracy was not destroyed in a coup or a violent revolution. It was undermined from within. Circumstance and Hitler’s determination did the rest.
Richard E. Frankel, Associate Professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is the author of Bismarck's Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945.
Sexual assault has arguably become the hot-button issue of the fall. Harvey Weinstein's fall and the #MeToo social media movement have awakened many Americans to the reality that almost every woman has encountered sexual harassment or assault at some point in her lifetime. Now many parents are asking how they can protect their daughters from becoming victims and their sons from being perpetrators. Sexual harassment and assault are highly pervasive among children. According to a 2011 study, 56 percent of girls reported having experienced sexual assault while in school. One piece of advice some parenting experts are giving is: stop telling adolescent girls that boys are mean to them “because they like you.” It’s an outdated response that normalizes male aggression against women at a dangerously young age.
The aforementioned study also shows how normalized sexual assault is in the eyes of offenders: 44 percent of the students who admitted to sexually harassing others didn’t think of it as a big deal, and 39 percent said they were just “trying to be funny.” Clearly, sexual harassment and assault is a silent presence among today’s children, and when parents tell their daughters to ignore or tolerate it, they prop up a devastating cycle of violence. For far too long, American parents have tolerated aggressive behavior in boys. Even implicitly, adults condone violence in boys; studies show that parents are more tolerant of boys who act aggressively toward peers and siblings than of girls who do the same.
Teaching girls to speak up when they are violated is a cornerstone of the third wave of feminism. Parenting expert Robyn Silverman, host of the podcast How to Talk to Kids About Anything, explains that parents who tell girls that boys are being mean to them because they like them actually disempower their daughters from speaking out when they are put in painful situations. “It tells them that they shouldn't complain about the conduct because, even though the delivery is hurtful or uncomfortable, it's 'nice' to be liked—and isn't that what all girls are supposed to want? It all at once excuses the ugly behavior, gives it a favorable label and silences the girl.”
Silverman continues, “The message is insidious, the most atrocious kind of earworm that rings inside a girl's head as she continues to interact with boys: their behavior is OK because the reason for their actions is seen as favorable.”
Also, when parents tell their daughters that boys mistreat them because the boys find them attractive, the adults create an unhealthy connection between sex and violence for these girls. As Heather Hlavka of Marquette University explains, in a recent study, “young women overwhelmingly depicted boys and men as natural sexual aggressors, unable to control their sexual desires. Girls normalized their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse because they were so common and indiscriminate; ‘that’s what boys do’ and ‘they do it to everyone.’” It’s all part of a normalization of male violence that begins in childhood and is hushed up by parents who don’t connect the dots to later male aggression.
This bad advice also enforces dangerous and rigid gender roles in kids. Slate’s Melinda Wenner Moyer recently asked how parents can shield children from sexism early on. As it turns out, not much is under parents’ control, although parents can do their best to keep from enforcing gender stereotypes. When children adhere strongly to common perceptions about gender, they become tied to a system of typecast sexual roles. As early as their teen years, “adolescents with strong gender stereotypes start to believe that boys are constantly seeking out sex and that girls should strive to look pretty and seek boys’ sexual attention.”
The lessons children learn about gender violence can greatly impact them later in life. Young girls who are taught to believe that aggression and bullying from boys is an indication of affection can go on to date men who mistreat them. Boys are negatively affected, too. We’ve already known for years that young boys who see assault normalized when their fathers hurt their mothers are more likely to hurt their own partners or spouses later on in life. As Moyer writes for Slate, “studies also find that the more strongly boys believe [gender] stereotypes” like the notion that bullying girls is OK, “the more likely they are to make sexual comments, to tell sexual jokes in front of girls, and to grab women.”
Sexual assault and consent can be difficult subjects to broach with children, but these topics are crucial to bring up. Silverman explained how parents can take action early on to encourage their daughters to speak up when they’re touched or spoken to inappropriately. “As a parent myself, I have looked both my daughter and son in the eyes and told them: If someone is touching their private body without their consent, this is not okay and they should speak up. If they are touching someone else's private body without consent, this is not okay and they should stop. And yes, if they see this behavior in action, they should speak up, stop it or speak to someone else who can stop it. These are messages both boys and girls need to hear. And they need to hear it early.”
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