The firing of Preet Bharara and other U.S. Attorneys last week was suspicious for one reason: It comes at a time when Donald Trump's business is booming all over the world, which calls for a healthy skepticism -- if not a federal investigation -- of its legalities. It was only two months ago that the president…
“The longest-running show on television” is how NBC’s weekly Sunday morning political program Meet the Press bills itself. In this case, longevity might be proof of innocuousness. For years, under the stewardship of Lawrence Spivak, who had the personality of a high school shop teacher, the show was a press conference of the pre-Trump variety — low-key, staid, formal, non-confrontational. But over the years, Meet the Press and its clones on CBS, Face the Nation, and ABC, This Week, not to mention the knockoffs on cable, have gained importance out of proportion to their relatively meager ratings. This is in part because they are the place for politicians to spin, and in part because that spin is amplified by sound bites on the evening news, in newspapers and on the radio. You could almost say that the debate starts here, which was the case this past Sunday on the GOP’s new health care — or health I-couldn’t-care-less — plan. More, these shows help define the quality of the debate.
With that in mind, on Sunday I watched the two most venerable of these shows, Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Long ago Meet the Press had morphed from Spivak’s somnambulant show to Tim Russert’s less polite, more hyperactive one. Russert, who died of a heart attack in 2008 after presiding over the program for 16 years, is venerated now, but from his Sunday perch, he damaged political journalism in two ways. First, he indulged a faux populism in the persona of a beefy, working-class galoot from Buffalo who was a chip off Big Russ, his working-class Pop. It was a pose; if Russert were working-class, he was a blue-collar millionaire — and it seemed cleverly designed to play against media elitism, which hurt the media’s credibility even as it boosted Russert’s and the show’s. Second, he created a faux journalism in which catching a politician in a contradiction became an entertaining stunt, one that superseded real probing of ideas and values. In that way, he transformed the Sunday shows.
NBC knew Russert would be a hard act to follow. His first replacement, reporter David Gregory, apparently was too much a sobersides to perform the old Russet parlor tricks. His replacement, Chuck Todd, did better. And to give Todd his due, he wasn’t too bad on Sunday. In fact, sometimes he was quite good.
Yes, he referred to “moderate Republicans,” as if there were such a thing. And, yes, he let Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price get away with a few whoppers, but not as many as one might have expected, and he even nailed Price down to making the surely erroneous claim that the GOP plan will provide better coverage than Obamacare and do it more cheaply. (This was before the impending Congressional Budget Office report that showed neither of these things was true.)
Now Price is on record. Where Todd fell down on the job was in letting Price get away with the refrain that Obamacare had “failed” (of course Price dare not mention that Republicans had done everything in their power to make it fail), and another refrain that premiums had skyrocketed when, in fact, they hadn’t. Only 3 percent of the insured, according to The New York Times, had seen substantial rises. Todd didn’t say, though he should have, that as premiums rose for all but this 3 percent, subsidies also rose. (This is a perfect case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease and the press.) And he failed to challenge Price on how Medicaid functioned. Price said not well. He is wrong.
Later in the show, Todd interviewed Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who opted for a more robust Medicaid program than the GOP bill provides. (Of course he does: Ohio has 700,000 of its citizens on Medicaid.) Todd was clearly sympathetic to Kasich’s view that any successful reform has to be bipartisan, but he still let Kasich get away with the most tired of conservative clichés — the benefits of a “market-driven system.” Todd didn’t ask the most basic question: If the market had worked so well, why were so many folks before Obamacare uninsured? Indeed, if the market worked so well, why did we need Medicare or Medicaid or SCHIP?
What Todd did do, powerfully, was go to the data. He showed what the impact of the GOP repeal and replace would have in various communities on a 60-year-old who makes $40,000 a year. And remember, the GOP bill is most generous to the elderly, which isn’t to say that it is generous. He found that the biggest losers — that is, the communities that would lose most from the Obamacare repeal — were those that voted for Trump. Either the folks living there have a big surprise coming when they find they can’t afford insurance, or they care more about baiting immigrants and Muslims than they do about their own health. We may be about to find out. In any case, anyone who had doubts about the GOP plan now had more information to make up his or her mind about it.
All in all, not bad.
And compared to Face the Nation, it was like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. That show’s host, John Dickerson, opened with a taped interview with Speaker Ryan that was textbook in how to be spun. Ryan was predictably flannel-mouthed, telling fib after fib with all the earnestness (and deceit) of Leave It to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell: that the GOP had a “much better policy” than Obamacare (just ask the CBO); that the plan had been months in development (yeah, sure); that what Americans want most of all is “more freedom” (apparently freedom from health insurance); and the old standby, that Obamacare is “collapsing.”
Dickerson, calm, reserved, non-confrontational, was also woefully ill-prepared and wildly overmatched, which isn’t easy with Ryan, who is not exactly the sharpest tool in the political shed. “People are missing the historic nature of this,” Ryan avowed, meaning not only the end of Obamacare but also the end of Medicaid as we know it. Dickerson didn’t even provide feeble resistance, like challenging the consequences of Medicaid’s demise. To top it off, when Dickerson brought up Trump’s charges of being wiretapped by former President Obama, Ryan insisted, “There has been a lot of reporting about this,” without Dickerson amending that comment with, “Yes, in Breitbart and the ‘alt-right’ blogs.”
Dickerson returned with more Ryan later in the broadcast, after letting Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) deliver his own blather. (During the panel segment of the show, Republican adviser Avik Roy, pointed out that Paul, who now fiercely opposes tax credits to help folks pay for their insurance, felt very differently when the credits were being given to the elderly. Why didn’t Dickerson know that?)
Round Two also went to Ryan. When Ryan argued that the CBO is likely to find a large increase in the number of uninsured under his plan (as it did), he gave this cogent reason: because Obamacare had a mandate, and his plan doesn’t. Since he didn’t correct Ryan on this fundamental plank, Dickerson apparently doesn’t understand insurance any better than Ryan does. Of course it has a mandate. That is how you get healthy people to pay for sick people. “We are not going to make people do what they don’t want to do,” Ryan asserted, without any pushback from Dickerson about that being the only way you can insure the sick and elderly. Finally, when Ryan delivered his coup de grâce, that Republicans never said they would insure everyone, only that they would assure “universal access” to coverage, Dickerson didn’t fire back: Everyone already has access to health insurance. It is the means to pay for it that they don’t have.
I won’t belabor Face the Nation’s journalistic panel, except to say that when Peter Baker of The New York Times repeats the tired cliché that Ryan is “wonky and smart,” we just saw evidence that he was neither; and to say that Avik Roy acquitted himself again when he blew the whistle on his fellow Republicans by admitting many of them never believed in Medicaid in the first place.
So this is how the media debate on health care begins: with dueling talking heads on Sunday morning. What it demonstrates is that if we are going to have a serious conversation, the media better be up to the task. They need to know their stuff. They need to be willing to challenge obviously false assertions. They need to correct the spin. Dickerson seems to think doing so would be a violation of objectivity, which is the standard operating procedure of television news. Don’t talk back. Todd, at least, wasn’t going to play nice. That is a beginning.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
On Monday, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that a whopping 14 million people will be left uninsured next year if the GOP's new health care bill passes. To the surprise of no one, the Trump administration has responded by sticking its collective fingers in its ears.
"It's just not believable, is what we would suggest," Heath and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said, a sentiment echoed by former Trump campaign economic adviser Stephen Moore later that day.
"I don’t believe this report,” Moore told Anderson Cooper in an interview on CNN’s AC 360.
“I think it’s hocus-pocus,” he added, insisting the GOP's multi-step process will “provide more competition and will make it more economical for people to buy insurance" long-term.
Count Labor Secretary Robert Reich among the report's many believers.
“Donald Trump said over and over again during the campaign, and he said again after he was president, that nobody would lose coverage,” Reich recalled. “Well, here you have the Congressional Budget Office, whose director was appointed by the Republican Congress, saying in effect that you’ve got huge losses.”
According to the report, that 14 million figure is set to nearly double over the course of a decade. Republicans, Reich explained, should proceed cautiously.
"If I were a Republican—a member of Congress right now—I would be worried that possibly this bill could be enacted because then I’d have to run for Congress again, I’d have to run for Senate when people were losing their health care and their health insurance and they’re angry about that," Reich explained.
He's not falling for the "access to heath care" rhetoric pushed by congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan.
“What kind of choice do you have if you can’t afford it?" Reich asked Cooper. "That’s when the Republicans are using these words like well, ‘you don’t lose access.’ Of course, you lose access if you don’t have any wherewithal.”
“Where is the replacement if it wasn’t in the Republican bill?” he hammered. “When are we going to see a replacement if it wasn’t already provided by the House Republicans and it is now being marked up by at least two committees? There is no plan."
Watch:
The system wasn’t supposed to work this way. The Founding Fathers deliberately devised a structure in which someone like Donald Trump — a vain, self-centered, mendacious demagogue — could never become chief executive, and in which the legislature could never be captured by a reckless, ideologically obsessed minority bent on overriding the majority interests of Americans. Those Founders labored to create an independent judiciary that was not captive to any single ideology or party. They carefully crafted a set of checks and balances in which no single branch of government could overpower another, and in which each held its own prerogatives dearly. In doing so, they thought they had provided posterity with a wise, cautious and magnanimous governmental operation that would serve the larger public weal rather than advantage any particular group or party, and that could withstand the gusts of any given historical moment.
It actually worked surprisingly well for 250 years, which is not to say that it didn’t have plenty of hiccups or that special interests weren’t often privileged. But it doesn’t work anymore, and though I am optimistic enough to believe that we will have a new president and Congress someday who will change policies and perhaps set us back on the road to rationality and common decency (“Make America Good Again”), the Trump presidency and the Republican Congress have nevertheless exposed the flaws in the system itself.
The prognosis isn’t good: These flaws are embedded in the Constitution and cannot be repaired without wholesale change, which isn’t coming. These defects are now openly visible for the next demagogue and the next gaggle of political hypocrites and power mongers to exploit. You can forget all the alleged fail-safes. The Constitution was supposed to protect us from this. It was expressly designed to do so. It didn’t.
The system failed because the Founding Fathers did not anticipate anything like the modern Republican Party. On the contrary, they believed that extremism and overweening self-interest of the sort Republicans routinely display could always be quarantined. Were they wrong! Instead of the Constitution circumscribing reactionary populism, reactionary populism has circumscribed the Constitution. That is where we are now. And there is no way out.
The Founding Fathers weren’t naive idealists. They understood the deficiencies of human nature, which is why they felt the need to devise structural defenses against them. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But men weren’t, so it was. Still, our forebears were comforted by four assumptions that would underpin American democracy — four assumptions that let them believe their Constitution would sustain the new nation.
First, they believed that a national government would attract what John Jay described as the “best men,” men “whose wisdom,” Madison would concur in Federalist #10, “may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” In short, they envisioned a government of sagacious men of good will who set aside their own interests for the country’s: the “best and brightest.” Instead, we seem to have gotten the “worst and dumbest.” Examples abound, and this week’s rollout of the new Republican health care plan, which is likely to deprive at least 10 million Americans of health insurance while further enriching the rich is just another vivid demonstration of how the Founders overestimated the quality of future representation as well as our representatives’ dedication to the larger public good. Paul Ryan, the Republicans’ much-vaunted intellectual, doesn’t even know how insurance works!
Second, the Founders separated the three branches of government and assumed that each would check and balance the others as a form of protection against any one branch encroaching on the power of the others. As Madison put in it Federalist No. 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands. . .may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The basic idea was that if goodwill didn’t ensure good government, a sense of institutional loyalty — even across party lines — would help.
Again, for most of American history that actually worked reasonably well, despite the expansion of the party system and politicians’ growing allegiance to it. In the 20th century, for example, there was arguably no more popular president than Franklin Roosevelt. But when he sought to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices after the conservative court had ruled much of the New Deal legislation unconstitutional, there were howls of outrage that he had overstepped his constitutional bounds, and when in 1938, he sought to unseat congressmen in his own party who had opposed him, he triggered an intraparty revolt. Institutional loyalty overrode party affiliation, what Madison had disparagingly called “faction,” which is precisely how the system was designed to work.
But not anymore. Establishment Republicans may have griped during the campaign that Trump wasn’t sufficiently doctrinaire for their tastes, but how quickly those congressional Republicans fell in line after the election. Now there is virtually no distance between Trump, Congress and presumably, once Neil Gorsuch takes his seat on the Supreme Court, that institution as well. Separation of powers in a monoparty system is an absurdity because party and power supersede everything else, especially the public good. There is nothing Trump could possibly announce (say, for example, a former president wiretapping him), nothing he or his minions could possibly do (say, consorting with the Russians to tilt the election his way) that would move congressional Republicans to challenge him. We live in a Republican monopoly, and to hell with institutional loyalty or checks and balances. They don’t work.
Third, the Founders assumed that extremism could never take root in the government — not because there weren’t any extremists, but because the system had safeguards against their assuming power. (Not incidentally, Madison also observed, in a prophecy of Trump’s rise, that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”) Here Madison relied not on government structures, but on social ones. He thought that the diversity of the country, the sheer number of competing and countervailing interests, would prevent any single faction from riding roughshod over the others, and he adduced the example of religious sects where there were simply too many for one to be dominant.
Again, Madison was just plain wrong, because on one hand, he subscribed to the notion of a public driven in large part by rational self-interest, and on the other, because he didn’t imagine how fiercely extremists would press their cause. He couldn’t have foreseen how modern tools and technologies of manipulation, like mass media, social media, propaganda and persuasion, have coaxed people to forsake their self-interest. We know, for example, that some of the fiercest opponents of Obamacare are those who have benefited most from it.
Madison, then, didn’t foresee that a major party could be hijacked by extremists, as the Republicans have been, or that those extremists would then expunge from the party the very diverse elements that Madison had identified as our democratic safeguard. Or to put it another way, the Republican Party monopolized itself before it monopolized our government. Not even the farmers, small businessmen, Rotarians and Wall Street bankers who had formed the core of the pre-Reagan party saw that coming. About one thing, however, Madison was right: Extremists have no interest in democracy.
And that brings us to the Founders’ fourth and most important assumption. They assumed that those who aspired to power did so to govern; they didn’t aspire to govern to gain power. But what happens when a major party doesn’t believe in government itself? Republicans profess to love the Constitution. They carry copies in their shirt pockets and wave them at every opportunity. But here is the quandary: The Constitution creates the government, and Republicans profess to hate government every bit as much as they love the Constitution. Indeed, the modern GOP not only arose from the forces of extremism — the Manionites, John Birchers and Apocalyptics. It arose from those who vowed to destroy government as we know it — or, as one recent anti-government Republican, Steve Bannon, promised, “to deconstruct the administrative state.”
You can’t blame the Founders for not having anticipated that the government could be taken over by fanatics who don’t believe in government. No document, no system could have offered protection from this.
So kissing the Constitution is really a neat trick to disguise how little the Constitution really matters now, how pro forma it has become, how its assumptions have been savaged. A government that was predicated on goodwill has few practitioners of it and virtually none among the current governing party. A government in which power was subject to checks and balances has virtually none, only party uniformity. A government in which, in the words of one constitutional scholar, it was “almost impossible for a zealous movement to sweep like wildfire . . . and seize control,” has been seized by such a movement. And a government that was designed to provide stability, temperance, deliberation and wisdom is controlled by a party that doesn’t even believe in government, much less those virtues.
Yes, as I said, others will occupy the White House and Congress and even the Supreme Court. But there is nothing they can do to rebuild the structure the Republicans razed when they tore down the Constitution. What is left is the rubble.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
The home page of Breitbart.com, the quasi-official voice of Steve Bannon’s White House, is a virtual stew of menace, a pit of monsters, an unending onslaught of apocalyptic horsemen rearing up at full gallop, coming straight at you, drawing closer…. But what the Breitbart reader is not being warned against is poisoned water, eviction, a melting glacier, a rising sea, a pauper’s grave, a burning cross, a bank swindle or a loss of medical care. Those are the kind of fears that afflict liberal wimps brainwashed by “the enemy of the people.”
A Breitbart reader quivers, all right, hunkered down in the safe spaces of Fortress America while enemies gather outside the gates. But what he or she needs protection from is, to take a recent dozen, (1) a “mass-murdering bureaucrat”; (2) an armed home invader in Louisiana who demanded money and wouldn’t accept food stamps; (3) naked, mushroom-crazed brothers running amok through an apartment complex in Indianapolis; (4) machete and axe attacks in Germany; (5) a woman in Belgium suspected of plotting a terror attack; (6) man-hating Swedish feminists; and, speaking of Sweden, (7) a growing number of fatal shootings there, and also there, (8) a suspected car bomb; and back at home, (9) a Trump-defying Paul Ryan who “targets his own Republicans, not Democrats, on Health Care”; (10) Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) warning that the CIA is spearheading “authoritarian government”; (11) to our north, “Women Kicked Out of Women’s Shelter to Make Room for a ‘Transgender’ Man,” and, if you like your fright more graphic, (12) “Mexican Cartel Spreads ISIS-Like Beheading Video to Gain Border Turf near Texas.”
And the next thing you know, when you’ve barely recovered from reading about the machete mayhem in Germany, here comes a report of tear gas released into the Hamburg metro. How dangerous is that? It depends where you look. If you read all the way to the bottom of the post, you earn this correction: “Due to a translation error, the original version of this article said 50 people were injured. In fact 50 people on the train were affected and at least six people are known to have been injured so far.”
In tune with Steve Bannon’s watered-down remake of Apocalypse Now, the world is going to hell. There are vultures, vultures everywhere. There is not only “American carnage” but European carnage, carnage just over the border, the French covering up for the sinister Mexicans, carnage sloshing throughout the entire Judeo-Christian world — though the agitated reader will occasionally find consolation in the bull market and in the knowledge that US Marines are “inching closer” to the ISIS-held Syrian city of Raqqa.
This reader will not learn from Breitbart that those Marines constitute a single artillery unit that, according to Reuters, has not yet opened fire. Odds are that this reader takes Breitbart’s word about Scandinavian carnage — a theme that’s now been beaten to death by the man in the White House — and will fail to dive deeper into the official Swedish murder statistics, so as to discover, for example, that between 2001-05 and 2011-15, deadly violence declined, although guns were more frequently used during the latter period, a fact officially attributed to the growth of gangs. By the way, in 1997, the rate of murder and manslaughter, with and without guns, was 1.77 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with almost four times that rate, 6.80, for the United States — assuming that one feels like cherry-picking dates to prove points.
You, unsuspecting reader, you taxpaying innocent, you American babe in the woods, you, peacefully going on about your business in your apartment complex, you, pathetically offering up your unacceptable food stamps — They have it in for you. They are everywhere. As the man in the White House said about Obama body language he didn’t approve of: “There’s something going on.”
Breitbart dispenses a veritable potpourri of danger. Its front page is a sort of demonic Believe-It-Or-Not where the headlines signal violence lurking and hovering just over the heads of the virtuous. This is not Ripley’s brand of weird news — “Food Carvings by Japanese Artist Gaku: The artist eats them when he’s done”; “Rhea the Featherless Bird — AKA Naked Birdie,” “Secret Nazi Base Treasure Hunter Found in Arctic,” that sort of thing — Breitbart’s pattern is a guided tour. For instance: Might Breitbart’s fascination with violence in Sweden and Germany have something to do with their social-democratic propensities and immigrant populations, although nothing in the reports I’ve linked to above bears on the question of whether immigrants are the murderers (or victims, for that matter)?
Trump has channeled Breitbart since the days when Breitbartiana fueled his birtherist fantasy about Barack Obama. Lately, Breitbart, for one reason or another, has let go of birtherism, leaving it to another lunatic-right entry, Gateway Pundit, to keep the fires burning with the claim that a Trump-supporting Kenyan half-brother of Barack Obama has tweeted what purports to be a copy of the former president’s birth certificate showing that he was born at Coast Providence General Hospital, Mombasa, British Protectorate of Kenya (which Gateway Pundit, just above the “certificate,” spells “Mombassa”).
As Breitbart and Gateway Pundit seize the dark side, Fox News adopts a lighter touch, aiming to distinguish itself from outright hysteria. In fact, in the White House briefing room on Friday, Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker, noting that Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Windrich was present, audibly declared that the site “hate[s] blacks, Jews, Hispanics,” and earned handshakes from other reporters. (Windrich is the author of this tweet: “Women’s suffrage was one of the country’s largest disasters.”) Online, Rupert Murdoch’s feel-good operation is mainly content to gloat, sneer and compile names for an enemies list. Rejoice: Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III “asks remaining 46 attorneys from Obama administration to resign.” Gloat: “Hillary Clinton campaign among worst, study finds.” Sneer at the French, always good for an enemies list: “French official rebukes world’s largest cement maker for being willing to help build Trump’s wall.” (Breitbart runs this item, too.) The universe that Fox News heralds these days is strangely benign. It radiates confidence. It offers solace to Breitbart’s bruised readers.
Who would have thought that Rupert Murdoch might be an also-ran at the great game of apocalypse? That it would prove, at least for a while, the Xanax of right-wing media, the kinder, gentler cop of Trumpland? Readers, shudder. Fox News’ next slogan might be: We’re Normal.
Note: This story was updated on March 13, 2017, to include mention and a link to Anne Applebaum’s article in the Washington Post about Trump and his obsession with Sweden.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
Trump and his White House don’t argue on the merits. They attack the institutions that come up with facts and arguments they don’t like.
They even do it preemptively. Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office couldn’t be trusted to come up with accurate numbers about the costs and coverage of the Republican’s replacement for the Affordable Care Act.
“If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place,” he said.
So what’s the right place? The Oval Office?
Bear in mind the director of the CBO is a Republican economist and former George W. Bush administration official who was chosen for his position by the Republican Congress in 2015.
No matter. The White House is worried about what the CBO will say about Trumpcare, so it throws the CBO under the bus before the bus arrives.
Trump couldn’t care less about the long-term consequences, but the rest of us should. For more than four decades the U.S. budget process has depended on the CBO’s analyses and forecasts. The office has gained a reputation for honesty and reliability under both Republican and Democratic appointees. Now, it’s tainted.
This has been Trump’s MO since he first met a fact he didn’t like.
When candidate Trump didn’t like the positive employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy improving under the Obama administration, what did he do? He called the official unemployment rate “such a phony number,” “one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics” and “the biggest joke there is.”
It’s possible to take issue with the ways the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment, but why undermine public trust in the Bureau itself?
Of course, when February’s job numbers turned out rosy, Trump’s White House embraced the monthly employment report. But the damage has been done. The BLS looks political.
Spicer tries to wrap Trump’s institutional attacks in populist garb: “I think [Trump] addressed that in his inaugural speech when he talked about shifting power outside of Washington D.C. back to the American people because for too long it’s been about stats … and it’s been about, what number are we looking at as opposed to what face are we looking at?”
Rubbish. The only way we can understand the true dimensions of the problems real people face is with data about these problems, from sources the public trusts. But if the credibility of those sources is repeatedly called into question by the president of the United States, there’s no shared truth about the problem.
When Trump disagreed with judicial findings about his original travel ban, he didn’t offer any reasons or analyses. Instead, he called the judge who issued the stay a “so-called judge” and attacked the appellate judges who upheld it as “so political” they weren’t “able to read a statement and do what’s right.”
When he blamed the intelligence agencies for the downfall of his first national security advisor, he didn’t spell out why. He just attacked them, issuing disparaging tweets with “intelligence” in quotation marks.
When he dislikes press reports, Trump doesn’t try to correct them. He assails the press as “the enemy of the American people,” “dishonest,” purveyors of “fake news,” and “the opposition party,” and questions their motives (they “have their own agenda, and it’s not your agenda, and it’s not the country’s agenda”)
When polls show that he has a low approval rating, he doesn’t say he expects the rating to improve. He attacks the entire polling industry, asserting “any negative polls are fake news.”
When scientists come up with conclusion he disagrees with, he doesn’t offer other credible sources of scientific data. He attacks science.
Trump thinks climate change is a hoax. His new head of the Environmental Protection Agency asserted last week that climate change isn’t caused by human activity.
What does the Trump administration do to prove the point? Nothing. Instead, it tells EPA staffers to remove pages from the EPA’s website concerning climate change, threatens to review all the agency’s data and publications, and cuts the budgets of all scientific research in government.
Trump’s big lies are bad enough because they subvert the truth and sow confusion. But Trump’s attacks on the institutions we rely on as sources of the truth are even more dangerous, because they make it harder for the public to believe anything.
In a democracy, the truth is a common good. Trump is actively destroying the truth-telling institutions our democracy depends on.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
The semi-annual meeting of the Sea Grant Association in Washington, D.C., is usually a straightforward affair. It’s typically a time for administrators from around the country to discuss coastal research and hash out the association’s business.
But as members gather to start their meeting on Tuesday, there’s plenty of drama. The Trump administration reportedly plans to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and gut federal funding for NOAA’s Sea Grant program.
This time, Sea Grant’s very existence is at stake.
“My initial reaction [to the news] was horror and disgust,” says Jim Eckman, director at California Sea Grant. “I think we’re facing a much graver crisis that we’re going to have to deal with.”
Though hardly a household name, Sea Grant funds important work, supporting over 3,000 scientists and paying for coastal research through 33 university programs. Sea Grant projects shed light on sea-level rise, ocean acidification, the effect of melting glaciers on kelp beds, and much, much else.
Congress created the Sea Grant program in 1966 in part to improve scientific understanding for the fishing industry. Since then, it has helped pay for projects that encourage commercial fishers to adopt sustainable practices off the coast of Ventura, California. It has backed efforts to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and to forecast the loss of wetlands from hurricanes hitting Louisiana.
Sea Grant directors get federal money and hustle to match it with private and state investment for research. Sometimes they manage to double what the government gives them. But without a federal commitment, the program would be finished, says MaryAnn Wagner, a spokesperson for Washington Sea Grant.
Coming to grips with the reality of climate change is scary enough. Dealing with its assault on coasts without the extensive research to understand the consequences? Downright devastating, administrators say.
In coming days, directors will start mapping out plans to defend the program. “Big fights are a-brewin’,” Eckman says.
The Trump administration reportedly wants to use the cuts to NOAA and its $73 million Sea Grant program to help pay for a $54 billion boost in military spending.
Eckman and other directors doubt Sea Grant’s bipartisan support in Congress will erode so quickly for a program it has supported for decades. They hope Congress will have their backs.
“I have to assume there are some wise people in our Congress who see the flaw” of prioritizing defense over science, says Paul Anderson, who directs Maine Sea Grant. “Mr. Trump is setting up for a political battle.”
Sea Grant’s managers say Trump’s proposal underscores the administration’s disrespect for science. They suspect similar cuts will come to programs at the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service — at a cost to scientific understanding.
Slashing funding for scientific research would be “a disservice to everybody in the nation and the world,” Anderson says. “It’s like flying blind. Why would we fly blind if we don’t have to?”
Though the cuts seem drastic, it’s not the first time a president has threatened to obliterate the Sea Grant program. In 1981, the Reagan administration proposed pulling federal funding. A task force assembled to defend Sea Grant. An analysis of 57 examples from the program found the $270 million the government spent on Sea Grant during its first 14 years yielded $227 million in economic benefits each year. Congress was ultimately swayed to protect it.
A similar political dance could happen this time. According to Wagner from Washington Sea Grant, every federal dollar spent returns about $8 in economic benefits. A NOAA analysis shows the program helped support $575 million in economic development and more than 20,000 jobs in 2015. “This is a small but mighty program,” Wagner says.
Knowing Sea Grant has survived a challenge before buoys hope that maybe the Trump administration won’t succeed in scrapping it. “It makes me less worried,” says Linda Duguay, a Sea Grant director at the University of Southern California. “But then, I thought the election was going to go in a different direction.”
Donald Trump has now been in the White House for 50 days. We’ve been chronicling the eco-carnage of his presidency in our Trump Tracker columns. Three weeks have passed since the last column, and hoo-boy, have the president and his cabinet of deplorables been busy since then, swinging the wrecking ball every which way. Here’s what you need to know.
Harsh budget cuts
What happened? The White House released an outline of its initial budget plan and (surprise!) it’s bad news for environmental protection and public health. Trump wants to steer $54 billion more a year toward defense and slash spending elsewhere. The EPA is right in Trump’s crosshairs; the president’s plan would cut the agency’s budget by about 24 percent and its staff by about 20 percent. The many casualties of those cuts would include the Energy Star label and environmental justice programs. Proposed cuts at other agencies and departments — some in the initial budget outline, some leaked to the press — would hammer clean energy R&D, coastal research, NOAA’s satellite and research programs, and oh so much more.
How much does it matter? Don’t get too alarmed just yet. The president doesn’t ultimately get to write the federal budget; Congress does. Some congressional Republicans don’t like Trump’s proposed cuts to EPA and other departments, so their budget plans will look quite different from his. Still, expect EPA and other environment-related programs to get hit hard, even if not as hard as Trump wants.
EPA is getting walloped
What happened? As if the looming threat of big budget and staff cuts weren’t enough, EPA is under assault in myriad other ways. Its ability to prevent water pollution will be hampered down the line because Trump ordered the agency to begin the process of rolling back a major regulation, the Waters of the U.S. rule, that protects streams and wetlands.
And then there’s the guy running the place, Scott Pruitt. The new EPA administrator is stacking the agency with climate deniers, the New York Times reports. Pruitt admitted this week that he doesn’t even accept the scientific fact that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to climate change. Last week, he said that people who want to eliminate his agency altogether are “justified” in their thinking: “I think people across the country look at the EPA the way they look at the IRS.” No wonder morale among EPA employees has tanked. The agency’s top environmental justice official just quit.
How much does it matter? A lot. EPA is the one federal agency protecting Americans from air pollution, water pollution, toxic sites, and more. It’s already been weakened, and it will be weakened much further. EPA is more vulnerable now than it was even under previous Republican presidents because Democrats no longer control either the House or the Senate and so have little power to defend the agency. The result will be more Americans exposed to pollution, hit with health problems, and dying prematurely.
A fuller, dirtier cabinet
What happened? Congress confirmed more of Trump’s not-so-green nominees. Ryan Zinke, a big booster of the coal and oil industries, is now secretary of the interior. He got some attention for riding a horse to work on his first day in the new job. Less noticed was his announcement that another 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico will be leased to oil and gas companies. “Opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling is a pillar of President Trump’s plan to make the United States energy independent,” Zinke said. (The new offshore drilling plan isn’t so different from President Obama’s, though.)
Also: Rick Perry, a diehard climate denier, is now secretary of energy. And Ben Carson, another climate denier, has officially taken the helm at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
How much does it matter? Quite a bit, but it could be worse. Zinke will be able to promote drilling and mining on millions of acres of federal property, and he could make it harder for renewable energy projects to be developed on public lands. Perry will probably preside over a slashing of funds for clean energy research programs. Carson is unlikely to support housing programs that would help low-income people live near jobs and transit. But none of them are ideologues like Pruitt, who is hell-bent on eviscerating environmental protections, so we don’t expect them to cause quite so much damage.
Here’s what you can expect to see in our next Trump Tracker rundown: The president will order rollbacks of a handful of major Obama rules, including the Clean Power Plan, auto fuel economy standards, and the moratorium on new coal leasing on federal land. So much to look forward to!
Hours after House Republicans released their Obamacare repeal bill, sharp divisions among GOP lawmakers erupted, suggesting the repeal effort might implode. But by Wednesday, the White House was plowing ahead and lobbying with Speaker Paul Ryan.
Initially, pundits speculated the GOP leadership's legislation might not get through both chambers. A slew of House right-wingers said it didn’t go far enough to dismantle the funding mechanisms bringing coverage to 20 million recipients. Meanwhile, a few Republican senators opposed its funding cuts to their state’s Medicaid expansion, suggesting it might not have sufficient support to pass that chamber.
On Tuesday, AARP, the lobby for people over age 50 and retirees, came out against it. By Wednesday, the American Medical Association and American Hospital Association weighed in, joining Democrats in opposing the House bill. But other businesses and interests that would see tax cuts benefiting them announced their support.
"This legislation as currently drafted is...likely to result in a substantial reduction in the number of Americans able to buy affordable health insurance or maintain coverage," a letter to Congress from hospital and health care organizations said. "Currently, 21 million Americans have gained health care through the marketplaces and through expansion of the Medicaid program. We are very concerned that the draft legislative proposal being considered by the House committees could lead to tremendous instability for those seeking affordable coverage."
What is unfolding in American politics and health care is unambiguously dire. Republicans clamoring for repeal are in an ideological bubble where they are blind to its real-life implications, from individual hardship to wreaking chaos in the health care system. But beyond the bill's specifics and the growing political fray is the larger reality that the repeal legislation is really the first salvo in a Republican-led class war on ordinary Americans.
"The bill aims to take a wrecking ball to the principle of universal coverage," wrote John Cassidy for the New Yorker. "If enacted, millions more Americans would end up without any health care. For many people who purchase individual policies, especially older people, it promises fewer services for more money. And it also proposes a big tax cut for the rich, which would be financed by slashing Medicaid, the federal program that provides health care to low-income people."
From a political perspective, right-wingers have lost touch with reality. They think current House proposals that will cut coverage for millions, raise costs for millions more and impose rationing on Medicaid clients are insufficient. Their demand for more spending, taxation and regulatory rollbacks are likely to be met somewhat to push the legislation ahead. Their rhetoric, that Obamacare repeal is an act of fiscal responsibility, is a big lie affirmed by the bill’s tax breaks for wealthier Americans and health industries. Make no mistake, the House leadership's bill seeks to redistribute billions in health care spending dollars upward. Obamacare’s taxes and subsidies did the opposite, to preserve private insurers but expand the public's coverage.
Even with Trump lobbying members of Congress, Ryan still needs to deal with tantrum-throwing right-wingers who have labeled his bill, “Obamacare 2.0” (Rep. Justin Amash, R-MI), “the last thing we need” (Rep. David Brat, R-VA) and a “new entitlement” (Rep. Mark Sanford, R-SC). The worst of the repeal legislation remains to be seen.
Stepping back from the opening salvos, health policy experts who have real-life experience running government safety net programs say dismantling Obamacare is a foil concealing a larger target—gutting public health programs writ large, regardless of its impact on ordinary Americans (such as forcing millions to shift their limited resources toward paying for health care or going without it).
There’s no shortage of analyses confirming these painful consequences, starting with the New York Times’ lead editorial Wednesday, “No wonder they hid the health bill.” Andrew Slavitt, acting administrator for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2015 to 2017, wrote in the Washington Post that the GOP’s proposal would not only drive up premiums, deductibles and co-pays for millions and undermine current insurance markets, but would also shred public safety nets literally involving matters of life and death.
“In my time overseeing the government agency that runs the [Medicaid] program, we dealt with many unexpected shocks—Zika [virus], high-cost drugs and the national opioid epidemic, to name a few,” Slavitt wrote. “Under the [per capita Medicaid spending limit] changes sought by Republicans, states would no longer have the resources to manage these crises, with devastating results for our communities. Medicaid pays for nearly half the births and half the long-term care in this country, to say nothing of the millions of Americans with disabilities who rely on it. If the federal government retreats on its commitment to Medicaid, the repercussions will be felt quickly—by our neighbors and by our care providers and hospitals.”
Slavitt didn't stop there. He said the bill’s goal was to set the stage for dismantling the government’s other major health care program, Medicare, which serves senior citizens. Here, too, under the guise of fiscal austerity, right-wingers would alter the system of paying for health care and seek to replace it with a fixed-expense model that would shift unexpected health care costs onto families.
“The bill would cut several years from the life of the Medicare trust fund, but that’s clearly no accident: The program would wind up right where ‘entitlement hawks’ such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) want it—in crisis,” Slavitt said. “If this bill became law, the speaker would finally be positioned to change Medicare to a [per capita] voucher program.”
There’s no shortage of additional examples about how the proposal would be a fiscal hardship for average Americans. It replaces Obamacare’s subsidies with annual tax credits of between $2,000 and $4,000. Forget, for the moment, that right-wingers like Sen. Rand Paul, R-TN, and the National Review are saying those proposed tax credits are too generous.
A $4,000 tax break, at best, would cover a smaller slice of the current premiums than most Obamacare subsidies, especially for those over age 50. The bill also allows insurers to raise premiums on older Americans another way, because it allows the industry to charge older customers five times what they can charge younger people. Under Obamacare, that ratio was three to one.
The bill’s sponsors say they would augment tax credits by expanding health savings accounts. Apart from the reality that average American households would be hard-pressed to put $500 or more away each month to offset what independent analysts said could be thousands more in annual health care costs, the GOP is essentially telegraphing that it wants people to use more of their savings for health care—not for college, higher education, mortgages, elder care or retirement.
It's important to note what Republicans are not talking about. While their messaging is emphasizing premium increases under Obamacare and how the program's insurance exchanges are suffering from lack of competition, the GOP is not discussing who is making undue profits in American health care. Nor are they discussing the simplest reform that would address the maladies they cite, allowing Obamacare states to create interstate pools where risk and costs could be shared among greater numbers of people and insurers.
While the politics of the Obamacare repeal effort are only beginning, what’s clear is its GOP sponsors are tinkering with the rules governing one-sixth of the economy in a manner that appears to be a giant transfer of wealth upward. These Republicans can talk about “free markets” and “individual choice" all they like, but there’s a better phrase for it: class warfare.
Republicans are poised to unleash a wave of health insecurity and economic hardship on poor, working- and middle-class Americans, as well as on the nation's system of medical providers, public health institutions and social safety nets. On social insurance listservs and discussion forums Wednesday, there was a debate about what to call the GOP bill: The Deplorable Care Act? The Unaffordable Care Act? Trumpcare? The I Don't Care Act? No matter what one chooses, this is class warfare and it will be painful.
Early Saturday morning, March 4, the 45th president of the United States alleged in a series of tweets that former president Barack Obama orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap Trump’s phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. Trump concluded that the former president is a “Bad (or sick) guy!”
Sunday morning, Trump called for a congressional investigation.
Trump cited no evidence for his accusation.
Folks, we’ve got a huge problem on our hands. Either:
1. Trump is more nuts than we suspected – a true delusional paranoid. Trump’s outburst was triggered by commentary in the “alt-right” publication, Breitbart News, on Friday, which reported an assertion made Thursday night by right-wing talk-radio host Mark Levin suggesting Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team’s dealings with Russian operatives.
If this is what triggered Trump’s tantrum, we’ve got a president willing to put the prestige and power of his office behind baseless claims emanating from well-known right-wing purveyors of lies.
Which means Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes that could obliterate the planet, or near anything else that could determine the fate of America or the world.
2. The second possibility is the Obama administration did in fact tap his phones. But if this was the case, before the tap could occur it’s highly likely Trump committed a very serious crime, including treason.
No president can order a wiretap on his own. For federal agents to obtain a wiretap on Trump, the Justice Department would first have had to convince a federal judge that it had gathered sufficient evidence of probable cause to believe Trump had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal or foreign intelligence wiretap.
In which case we have someone in the White House who shouldn’t be making decisions that could endanger America or the world.
3. The third possible explanation for Trump’s rant is he was trying to divert public attention from the Jeff Sessions imbroglio and multiple investigations of Trump associates already found to have been in contact with Russian agents during the election, when Russian operatives interfered with the election on Trump’s behalf.
Maybe he’s trying to build a case that the entire Russian story is a plot concocted by the Obama Administration – along with the intelligence agencies and the mainstream press – to bring Trump down. This way, he can inoculate himself against more damaging evidence to come.
But if it’s all a big show to divert attention and undermine the credibility of the intelligence agencies and the press, Trump is willing to do anything to keep his job – even if that means further dividing America, undermining trust in our governing institutions, and destroying the fabric of our democracy.
So there you have it. We have a president who is either a dangerous paranoid who’s making judgments based on right-wing crackpots, or has in all likelihood committed treason, or is willing to sacrifice public trust in our basic institutions to further his selfish goals.
Each of these possible reasons is as terrifying as the other.
For Democrats to be the only ones sounding the alarm risks turning it into the new normal of partisanship. For Obama himself to respond would only dignify it.
So the responsibility falls to Republican leaders to stand up and call this what it is: Dangerous demagoguery.
Former Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, former Republican senators and members of Congress, and current Republican senators and members of Congress, must have the courage and decency to stop this outrage.
We are in a serious crisis of governance, and their voices are critical.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
Assume for a moment, as many have suggested, that the whole Trump/Putin/Russia calamity is a deliberate distraction, a deflection to shift our gaze from the destruction of government and democratic principles that Trump, Bannon and their cohort — aided and abetted by a compliant Congress — seem intent on implementing.
What then to make of this weekend’s flurry of tweets from our commander-in-chief, first bellowing that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower in Manhattan and then demanding a congressional investigation? A distraction from a distraction? Or worse?
CNN’s Jake Tapper succinctly summed it up in a Sunday morning tweet of his own:
“POTUS makes wild accusation w/zero evidence
WH searches for evidence & cant find any
WH tells Congress to find evidence/no further comment”
It’s a classic authoritarian move: Make up a baseless charge and then demand that a loyal someone else — in this case the recumbent Republican Congress — prove it for you. But regardless of what they do or don’t find, you’ve successfully hurled your accusations into view and it will be hard to get them out of the public’s mind. Like Benghazi.
As of this writing, the latest major advance of the story came Sunday afternoon, when The New York Times broke the news that FBI Director James Comey “asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday.”
In a separate editorial, the Times warned, “This is a dangerous moment, which requires Congress and members of this administration to look beyond partisan maneuvering and tend to the health of the democracy itself.” Dream on — as one of my Texas aunts used to say, wishing ain’t getting. The White House and congressional Republicans care about as much about the health of democracy as they do the health of the millions of poor and middle-class people who will be flattened by four years of craven social and economic policy. Just look at their new repeal-and-replace Obamacare plan.
Besides, Comey is wrong — we know this because the sycophantic Kellyanne Conway says so. Trump is the president of the United States, she proclaimed on Fox and Friends Monday morning, and because of that, “He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not.” So there.
Down the rabbit hole we go, burrowing deeper and deeper through the twists and turns of Trump’s troubled mind. Why this latest blowup? As Karen Tumulty notes in The Washington Post, “When he wants to change a subject, he often does it by touching a match to the dry tinder of a sketchy conspiracy theory.” Or is this simply a mad flailing about from a president who realizes he’s in trouble not only over Russia but desperately in over his head about almost everything else too? For the most part, his promises are backed by nothing; he has no real solutions or legislative programs and hundreds of government positions needed to run the country remain unfilled.
(One highly notable, troubling exception: On Sunday, Eric Lipton and Binyamin Appelbaum of The Times reported on
“… More than 90 regulations that federal agencies and the Republican-controlled Congress have delayed, suspended or reversed in the month and a half since President Trump took office… one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades… In many cases, records show that the changes came after appeals by corporate lobbyists and trade association executives, who see a potentially historic opportunity to lower compliance costs and drive up profits.”)
When confronted, Trump’s childish answer always is to run off off to Twitter to change the subject or to blame someone else for his troubles, usually the intelligence community and “fake news,” but now it’s Barack Obama himself. Everybody’s out to get him, Trump thinks, conspiring to undermine and delegitimize his most amazing presidency ever.
If you’re really in the market for a reasonable conspiracy theory, how about this: By all accounts, Trump’s hyperventilated, weekend Twitter attacks on Obama were triggered not by actual evidence but by a Friday morning article on the Breitbart News website, which in turn was based, in part at least, on rantings the previous day from right-wing radio host Mark Levin. He contends that the Trump/Russia controversy and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from any investigation of it are just smokescreens hiding nefarious acts by Obama meant to bring Trump down.
There’s really nothing new in the accusations that Trump’s predecessor and/or “the deep state” were out to get him via wiretaps or other forms of surveillance; they go back to at least last fall when an article by Louise Mensch appeared on the conservative Heat Street website (Heat Street is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) and subsequent internet pieces from The Guardian and the BBC. From these and other sources — including The New York Times and The Washington Post — seem to have come the Levin tirade and Breitbart News piece but in a form manipulated to create the most sinister insinuation possible.
At the Just Security website, based at New York University School of Law, Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez took a close look at the Heat Street, Guardian and BBC articles. He points out, “[T]here’s nothing here to suggest either the direct involvement of President Obama nor any clear indication of a violation of the law… it might behoove the commander in chief to refrain from issuing serious and inflammatory accusations based wholly on ‘intelligence’ gleaned from Breitbart News.”
Journalist Marcy Wheeler, an expert on national security and civil liberties, agrees. The prior reporting, which involves Russian banks, email and a spam marketing server — not the wiretapping of telephones, by the way — reflects a certain lack of knowledge of how law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the courts work, not to mention a lethal dose of sheer speculation. In a comprehensive, important review of the evidence at her EmptyWheel website, she writes:
“Trump hasn’t been bugged. It’s quite likely a number of Trump’s close associates are, after incriminating information showed up about or involving them on other wiretaps. There’s zero reason to believe Obama ordered them, not least because everyone involved believed Obama was responding too nonchalantly to the Russian accusations.“Trump’s associates are bugged, to the extent one or more of them are directly targeted rather than being collected incidentally, because they’re suspected of being Russian assets.”
The Breitbart article, breathing heavily as it summarized Levin’s charges of a “silent” Obama coup, was written by Joel B. Pollak, the website’s senior editor-at-large and author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution. He worked with White House chief strategist Steve Bannon when Bannon ran Brietbart.
It’s fair to wonder: Did Bannon push Pollak and Breitbart to run the story — much as the Bush White House and Pentagon fed Judith Miller at The New York Times false accounts of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” then cited her reporting as proof that they were right?
Or did Bannon simply make sure Pollak’s Breitbart story was near the top of that well-known pile of printed out articles Trump looks at in the morning, count to 10 and wait for the presidential tantrum he was sure would erupt? Of all people, Bannon knows Trump has a track record of regurgitating fabricated nonsense that he hears and reads on right-wing media.
Speculation, of course. And a distraction, absolutely. Because there’s another deep state. It isn’t the corporate-government underground complex secretly running things but the deep, deep state of trouble we’re in.
That’s not just because of any skullduggery by Russia, although it’s clearer than ever that a special prosecutor or independent investigation is an absolute must. No, we’re being run straight off the cliff by a homegrown confederacy of dunces. And an intemperate, dangerous little child shall lead them.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
When the U.S. military invaded Iraq 14 years ago, in March 2003, it ignited a rebellion with its incompetent and harsh rule. Its response was to dub the resistance “anti-Iraqi forces.” It was a brazen bit of propaganda, even by Pentagon standards.
A heavily armed force of more than 100,000 soldiers from halfway across the world with no religious, cultural, or linguistic ties to a country it had illegally occupied was calling people defending their homeland anti-Iraqi forces.
The target of the propaganda was not the Iraqi people. They frequently expressed more support for attacks by overwhelmingly Iraqi guerrilla groups on American forces than support for the U.S. occupation. The target was Americans, many of whom willingly swallowed the absurdity that the Iraqi resistance, and not the Americans, were “foreigners, outside agitators, viruses newly burrowed into Iraq's body politic,” as one pundit put it.
This nugget of history is newly relevant. It is key to understanding how Donald Trump is bringing the “war on terror” home. Like the tumultuous Iraq occupation, Trump is weaponizing chaos. His goals are similar, too—consolidating autocratic rule and radically reshaping society.
This strategy is evident in Trump’s America-First worldview: Every threat is foreign and everything foreign is a threat, whether undocumented immigrants, radical Islamic Terrorism, steel, industry, missiles, drugs, or “bad ones.” They are all that stands in the way of “A new chapter of American greatness.”
His method is simple, which is what makes him so dangerous. Like U.S. generals in Iraq who defined who was a real Iraqi or not, based on their subservience to the occupation, Trump splits the nation into real Americans and those who are threats.
Few can forget when Trump joined the race in June 2015 he bashed Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, rapists, and criminals. But few remember he also said, “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you.” The two-sided message portrayed Mexicans as an alien threat to America and erased centuries of Mexican-American and Chicano history central to the American experience.
Same with other groups. Trump blames undocumented immigrants for “the American family that loses their jobs, their income, or their loved one.” Without extreme vetting, a “beachhead of terrorists [will] form inside of America,” and the nation will “become a sanctuary for extremists.” He conflates a vision of hellish inner cities with African-Americans and Latinos. “Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store, they have no education, no jobs.”
Trump is redefining these Americans as anti-American forces. They are an imminent danger, responsible for every social ill, and a disease that must be eradicated.
Like Pentagon war propaganda aimed at the home front, when Trump says “I will do more for African-American and Latinos than [Clinton] can do in 10 lifetimes,” he is not speaking to these groups. He is speaking to his white-supremacist base. (That some minorities support Trump does not negate his nativism as it is still his guiding ideology.)
When Trump says foreigners are “poisoning our youth” with drugs, he makes them out to be an existential threat. As such, no policy is too extreme, whether it’s mass deportations, torture, Muslim bans, or extinguishing “lawless savages … from our planet.” Police, border agents, and the military must be unshackled and set loose. And the tsunami of scandals has not deterred the Trump White House from pushing forward.
On day five in office, Trump signed executive orders that criminalize 11 million undocumented immigrants, making all of them a priority for deportation. He then widened the scope of immigration raids and empowered border agents to be more aggressive, such that they are now reportedly “looking really hard for reasons to deny, instead of reasons to admit” foreign visitors. He proposed lower standards for immigration police, potentially unleashing “rogue elements.” Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has vowed to pull back on consent decree with police departments, in effect endorsing police brutality. Trump plans to increase private detention facilities for asylum-seekers to 20,000 beds and has issued a new Muslim ban. He is ratcheting up tensions with Iran, escalating the brutal U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen, and demanding a $54 billion increase in military spending.
These moves, along with attacks on civil society, comprise a plan to divide America along sectarian lines of race, religion, and politics as the Pentagon did in Iraq. But it’s not just what he is doing; it’s how he does it. Trump has a “year zero” approach to governance, like the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
Trump wants to wipe history clean, creating a regime of chaos. Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, says as much: “It’s going to get worse” and “every day it is going to be a fight [for the] deconstruction of the administrative state.” Emboldening frontline police, border agents, and soldiers is Trump’s version of shock and awe. He is sowing fear and chaos and circumventing traditional chains of command. It’s similar to how he uses social media and conspiratorial news to win followers by bypassing and disorienting experts, media, and opinion-makers.
It is disorder by design, even if a specific act like the first version of the Muslim ban backfired. As shambolic as the Trump White House is, his state of constant meltdown benefits him. The more outrageous a falsehood the better, whether claiming more than 3 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote or that Obama wiretapped his phones during the election. When opponents castigate Trump for a “destructive” act that “discredits our democracy” they miss the point. He wields lies and chaos as a battering ram against anything in his way: the press, civil liberties, the judiciary, federal agencies, science, basic reality.
Trump is turning government powers and liberal values of tolerance and neutrality against government and liberal democracy. His lies are reported as fact, just as Pentagon propaganda that anti-Iraqi forces were trying to undermine American-led progress toward a safer, secure, rebuilt, and democratic Iraq was treated as news.
The difference between Trump and the occupation of Iraq is the latter was so remote, the lies were harder to unmask and seemed less consequential to most Americans. But no matter how obvious Trump’s lies, institutions like Congress, the FBI, and the media take them seriously because their power derives from accepting the legitimacy of the system, particularly the presidency. Their dilemma is if they state what is factually obvious, that Trump is lying, they play into his hands by appearing to be knee-jerk partisans.
In a state of chaos, “might makes right” is the only arbiter of social order. And no one wields more might than the Trump White House, head of the most powerful institution in human history. In Iraq, the chaos sparked uprisings that imperiled but never ousted the occupation because the United States provoked sectarian tensions that exploded into civil war.
There is little danger of America descending into a Hobbesian war of all-against-all as in Iraq, but that’s not for lack of trying. As Trump’s ideas trickle down, they curdle into rhetorical violence. At rallies, Trump supporters describe undocumented immigrants as parasites, mosquitoes, and flies, Black Lives Matter as violent, Islam as an ideology, and Arabs as ISIS members.
It’s a small step from there to actual violence as evidenced by the burst of hate-group activity since Trump entered the race in 2015. The number of hate groups in America is nearing an all-time high, anti-Muslim hate groups tripled in 2016, and nearly 1,100 bias attacks were recorded in the month after his election. Most ominous, violence motivated by his demagoguery—bomb threats, arsons, shootings, and now murders—appears to be spreading.
Trump’s response is to ignore or deny the hate he has spawned, while demonizing petty vandalism by leftists. A Department of Homeland Security report obtained by The Intercept describes window smashing at anti-Trump protests in Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C, as “domestic terrorist violence.” Republicans in 18 states have followed suit by introducing legislation to add new criminal sanctions to nonviolent protest.
Trump and the right are using the chaos they have instigated to broaden their attacks and consolidate their power. It’s like how the U.S. occupation created the conditions for Al Qaeda and ISIS to take root in Iraq, and then point to the blowback as reason for it to continue the war.
Demagoguery is not subtle. It is emotion-driven scapegoating that requires a constant stream of enemies. Trump will retain the upper hand as long as the chaos he creates dominates the political process. His need for enemies and his penchant for bombast could trigger a hot war in the Middle East or with North Korea.
But Trump and the forces behind him are not invulnerable. The Pentagon outmaneuvered the Iraqi resistance by playing one side against another and provoking them to alienate supporters with destructive tactics. The lesson is to build a unified resistance that defends all of those directly targeted by Trump: Muslims, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and transgendered people for starters. It also needs to have a vision of what it stands for, beyond mere opposition.
Organized mass disruption is how dictators fall, and Trump can be defeated through nonviolent walkouts, strikes, blockades, sit-ins, and boycotts as long as they retain popular support and legitimacy. But if the movement becomes divided against itself, that will play to Trump’s advantage. America will inch closer to a failed state and society. Like Iraq.
One of Donald Trump’s leading roles in his new regime is to play the part of Distractor-in-Chief. And judging from the Sunday morning talk shows' ridiculous preoccupation, with his fantasy of being wiretapped by President Obama, Trump is being highly successful in steering the media away from the real story.
Every tweet Trump bangs out has three primary purposes: 1) to lure most media and pundit discussion away from critical news Americans desperately need; 2) to embolden his base; and 3) to make ordinary people throw their hands up and say, "Just turn it off, I can’t watch it anymore," or a key variant, "Just turn it off, who even knows who is telling the truth? They are all liars."
People casually, dismissively or angrily refer to Trump as a pathological liar. That seems clearly to be true. But more dangerous is that he’s a strategic liar. And in the twisted calculations of his handlers, including Steve Bannon, it doesn’t matter one iota if anyone calls Trump a liar, as long as they also come to think of all media and anyone linked to the media—such as journalists, pundits, academics, experts, and think tanks—as liars too.
Trump and Bannon’s objective is to undermine experts and scientists defending successful social policy and the role of government, just as their allies successfully undercut scientists' ability to explain climate change by relentless efforts, using highly paid fossil industry experts, to plant seeds of doubt.
Think about it: 97 percent of scientists agree on something called the climate consensus, which boils down to the fact that fossil fuels and human action are responsible for planet-altering climate change. And yet climate change was basically not discussed during the entire presidential election cycle (yeah, of course Bernie raised it, but). The strategic, well-funded efforts of the fossil fuel industry have succeeded in taking one of the more important issues of our lifetime off the table.
Now the Trump people have set out a swift course to make climate scientists out of everyone else who also actually knows what’s really going on with other crucial issues, such as: what happened to good jobs (the destruction of America's unions, not immigration); and how increased joblessness and insecurity happened (hedge funds, not immigration, helped to turn a nation of workers into a nation of independent contractors without benefits).
As with its depressingly successful strategy of debunking climate science, the new administration’s real goal is to get everyone distracted, doubting everything, all the time, and ultimately disengaging completely because even to try to discuss serious matters with someone who doesn’t already agree with you 1,000 percent feels intimidating, or worse, futile.
The mainstream media unwittingly played a crucial if not decisive role in electing Trump. If they continue to be led astray by idiotic tweets, such as this weekend’s Obama wiretap trap, they will be aiding in the destruction of American democracy. That’s not hyperbole.
Jeff Sessions is a lynchpin to the planned, systematic undermining of the right to vote, as demographic changes further threaten white supremacy. When the extreme free marketers in the corporate class team up with the cultural right-wing in war-room planning sessions, “Get the attorney general’s office 100 percent on our side” is top on their flip-chart lists. The attorney general’s office is crucial to undermine if not destroy voting rights, clean air and water, labor, civil rights, and other equally critical laws.
The attorney general also acts as the defender of the administration, and as such, will play a crucial role in protecting and defending Trump and the crooks and thieves being positioned into key agencies so they can, per Steve Bannon’s words at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “deconstruct the administrative state.” Trump and Bannon truly need Sessions, a racist, homophobic misogynist, in the position at the helm of law enforcement, as attorney general. He covers all their asses.
Yet Sessions appears to have lied under oath. This should be ample reason for his resignation and investigation for perjury. But the Sunday morning talk shows all took the Distracter-in-Chief's bait. Instead of focusing on why Sessions should be sent to the sidelines, they focused on whether Obama wiretapped Trump, all based on a fantasy tweet. More of this pathetic Pavlovian media response to Trump tweets, and our democracy will truly be at stake.
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